“Maybe you are already lost and just do not know it.”

“[My mom’s] funny that way, celebrating special occasions with blue food. I think it’s her way of saying anything is possible. Percy can pass seventh grade. Waffles can be blue. Little miracles like that.”

“He’d changed since the last summer. Instead of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, he wore a button-down shirt, khaki pants, and leather loafers. His sandy hair, which used to be so unruly, was now clipped short. He look like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.”

“You are the god. Everything is there to serve you. Don’t forget that you are there to serve everyone and everything. Only through compassionate service will you find god and become god.”

“Pain, unless it is physical, was sold to you (by your culture).”

“You say, it’s dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.”

“I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love.”

“Sometimes the sins you haven’t committed are all you have left to hold onto.”

“I read somewhere… how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong… to measure yourself at least once.”

“We must eradicate ignorance and illiteracy from our nations and continent to the nearest minimum for us to have a national development.”

“I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.”

“We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were astonished every day.”

“It’s a good thing you’re an aging orphan,” he murmured, gently pushing the hair away from her face. “I don’t have to wait around to get anyone’s permission.””Permission for what, you rat bastard?” she said. “Such language, dragon. I’m afraid you’re going to have to marry me.”

“I gave in, and admitted that God was God.”