“All silence is. All emptiness. And now: The dawn.”

“What is it about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?...The thing man wanted to invent, but never did...If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It is a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledygook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.”

“I'm not a futurist.”

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

“One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight. At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months, and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands. And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more.”

“If you follow the ways in which you were trained, which you may have inherited, for no other reason than this, you are illogical.”

“True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.”

“A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”