“If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.They're right. It does.However much you beg it to stop.It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life...All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.And then the world turns...And somebody falls off...And oh God it's such a long way down.Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller...Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.Trying to measure how far we have to fall.No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives...Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold."Time's a great healer.""At least it was quick.""The world keeps turning."Oh Alec—Alec's dead.”

“At night we turned all the lights in every room of our house on. We turned the lights on the front porch on. We turned the lights on the back porch and over the garage on too. We wanted to keep the darkness that surrounded our house and us as far away from us as we could.”

“Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.Was Rorschach.Does that answer your Questions, Doctor?”

“Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!.Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home.”

“I am but a stranger ... as we all are. Lonely inside our separate skins, we cannot know each others pain and must bear our own in solitude. For my part, I have found that walking soothes it; and that, given luck, sometimes we find one to walk besides us ... at least for a little way.”

“We can only help make our lives and our world more peaceful, when we ourselves feel peace. Peace already exists within each of us, if we only allow ourselves to feel its comfort. Peace of mind begins when we stop thinking about how far we have to go, or how hard the road has been, and just let ourselves feel peace. Peace of mind gives us the strength to keep trying and keep walking along the path that we know is right for our lives.”

“Also, please don’t think I’ve forgotten about your outstanding service record, or about all the invaluable contributions that you’ve made to the company. Fire, the wheel, agriculture..It’s an impressive list, old timer. A jolly impressive list. Don’t get me wrong. But well...to be frank, we’ve had our problems , too. There’s no getting away from it. Do you know what I think? A lot of it stems from? I’ll tell you…It’s your basic unwillingness to get on with the company. You don’t seem to want to face up to any real responsibility, or to be your own boss. Lord knows you’ve been given plenty of opportunities. We’ve offered you promotion time and time again, and each time you’ve turned us down…To be frank, you’re not really trying are you?”