- Aabel: You are foolish, and you are evil. You called my special and gifted son a no-good dreamer. In our world on the planet Eros, it was the absence and abhorrence of dreaming that made men no good. They worked like insect slaves. They fought evil wars. They gathered lush riches and splendid pains, but they took no time out for dreams, and dreaming became a lost art.
- Ethan Wechsler: [enumerating the true charges against him] I am gonna be tried for reading minds and for walking on moonlit meadows and for being a thing that goes bump in the night.
- Mr. Greenbane: Are you implying that Ethan can read people's minds as well as make their corpses disappear into thin air?
- Sheriff Simon Stakefield: Ethan has been performing all sorts of witch-boy tricks ever since he was a child - he and the rest of those fatherless geniuses!
- Aabel: Shall we go?
- Ethan Wechsler: Where?
- Aabel: Where superstition and fear can never reach you again.
- Ethan Wechsler: There IS no such place on Earth.
- Control Voice: In the light of today's growing anxieties, it has bevcome more absolute that the wealth of the nation consists in the number of superior men that it harbors. It is, therefore, a matter of deep concern and deeper consequence when four of the most magnificent and promicing young minds in the country suddenly disappear off the face of the Earth.
- Ethan Wechsler: All four of these men, considered intellectually and physically superior in aptitude, performance and delivery, were born at the same place.
- Ethan Wechsler: The same state?
- Ethan Wechsler: In the same county - Spider County - and the same year, and within the same month. Their birth records are there and indicate a curious phenomenon. Each child was born at least two months premature. Immediately after birth, their fathers disappeared and were never heard from again. And each child, although unrelated - at least on the maternal side - had been given the same middle name: Eros.
- Ethan Wechsler: The Greek word for love.
- Ethan Wechsler: And it is also the name of an obscure planet in the galaxy Krell.
- Aabel: We do not have the power to kill, only to destroy, suddenly and totally. Killers have the power to kill, slowly and partially. We do not kill, Ethan. We uncreate.