It wasn__ Hell; only fools and drama queens throw that word around about a place like Gotham. It was worse, in a way, because it was manmade. There wasn__ any timeless malevolence behind it all, it was just_ what human beings can descend to when they let themselves forget they can be heroes.

I fear mostly my inability to capture all the things that come, I fear their mysterious source, I fear their fate, I fear me, in short. This is true_it__ like finding a river of gold when you haven__ even got a cup to save a cupful_you__e but a thimble, and that thimble is your pathetic brain and labour and humanness.

Winter is already a lost shape, forgottenin the ground. Instead, here is Springwith all the grace of a womansmoothing out her apron.

Always choose the adventure ... unless, it's chilly outside and there's a cup of warm coffee resting near a book and comfy sofa.

You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?" We didn't understand his question, and it was a damned good question.

...that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn__ know who I was__ was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I__ never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn__ know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn__ scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that__ why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.