“Don't be afraid to hear me. Don't shrink from anything I say. I am like one who died young: all my life might have been.”

“Ahhh-ahh! I'm so sorry! You were right! I am not the box of tomatoes fairies at all! It was all lies, lies, LIES! Please don't shoot me! I'm too young to die, and what if I don't die and but am just mortally wounded and forced to lie there in misery in a pool of my own blood?! Please, I'll do anything--well, I mean within reason-- I don't want to diiiiiiie!"-Italy's "I don't want to die" rant part one”

“I look sad because I don't have the courage to escape from you. And I think I don't want to understand the truth: for you, I am nothing but a dream. You like to play with life, you're not afraid of anything, not even of me. But I want you to know that I am not an object or a doll: I don't change faces on command, I like to sit down every day in the same place, on my own chair, and I know that you, you like to leave, to go to a new place every day. ”

“Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of anything. Whatever you have been, you are mine now. I can hold you.”

“But I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honourable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone. 'This Man Died from Living Too Much'.”

“I don't understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like some one who's lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.”