“Death is real, irreversible, and awful. Do you want some advice? Don't wait until you're dead to try to communicate. Do it now. You still have a chance. Not a great one, but a better one than you will have. If you think it's hard to get your point across now, and that no one really understands what you're about, just try it when you're dead.”

“His action of joining them, which would have been rude in a restaurant that was not moving at three hundred kilometers an hour, was perfectly acceptable on a train, which mimicked the entirely random joinings of life but revealed their true nature by making them last only hours or days, rather than years and decades. People on a train form an alliance, as if the world that surrounded the parallel rails were hostile and and they refugees from it. The dining car, humming and rocking gently in the night, annihilated past and future and made all associations outside of itself seem vaguely unreal. So they welcomed him at their table, for he was one of them, a traveler, not one of those wraiths through whose night-lit cities they passed.”

“But she's wrong about hell. You don't have to wait until you're dead to get there.”

“If you're here for four more years or four more weeks, you're here right now. I think when you're somewhere, you ought to be there. It's not about how long you stay in a place, it's about what you do while you're there, and when you go, is that place any better for your having been there?”

“They tended to dominate the air and liked annihilating things through saturation bombing, like gleefully violent children.”

“Use them with care, and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool. Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get into a really bad place, psychologically. Know what you're using, decide just why you're using it, and you can have a rich experience. They're not addictive, and they're certainly not escapist, either, but they're exceptionally valuable tools for understanding the human mind, and how it works.”

“It's a total lie to say there's only one person you're going to be with for the rest of your life. If you're lucky - and if you try really hard - there will always be more than one. ”