“They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.”

“She stood there bright as the sun on that California coast.
He was a Midwestern boy on his own.
She looked at him with those soft eyes, so innocent and blue.
He knew right then he was too far from home.
He was too far from home.”

“And oh she had been broken. She hid it well, but Ross knew from personal experience that once you had put the pieces together, even though you might look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall”

“They’d lived all their life on Earth; they knew nothing but the Earth. They had never really touched an alien concept, and that was all this concept was. It was not really as slimy as it seemed. It was only alien. There were a lot of alien things that could make one’s hair stand up on end while in their proper alien context they were fairly ordinary.”

“A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

“Horses make a landscape look beautiful.”

“Love … It’s a nice little trick if you can find it.

We had found it.

But now I knew finding love and holding on to it were not the same thing.”

“For a century and a half—from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the sixth—there had been… no formal communication between Rome and the Christians of Britain, nor had there been any between Rome and Ireland…”

“But I guess you would look beatific, too, if the man you had been in love with since the fifth grade had told you that he was in love with you, too.”

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.”