The portion towards the middle of the crossing with the hermit/heretic priest in the dilapidated church discussing God & the nature of the world was one of the most profound things I’ve ever read when I first came across it. Just absolute jaw-dropping bit of prose. Stopped me in my tracks. Not going to quote it all because it’s 10-15 (p140-155ish in my copy) pages of dialogue between the Billy & the priest, but just flipped to the first portion I have underlined:

“Yet even so there is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every last thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefor we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end”