“Something you killed didn't stay dead? Wow. That must have really put some termites in your coffin.”

“...if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”

“Or you can fake your own death," Bill suggested."Because really, that's the most cathartic resolution—if all your friends and family think you're dead. Everyone cries, they have a little rant about all your potential going to waste, they put on a memorial service and you can hide and see who bothers to come—and if you're really lucky, they bury an empty coffin. When they couldn't even be bothered to spot you a twenty 'til payday. You know how much booze you could buy for the cost of a single coffin?”

“You weren't there, you didn't see,' he said. 'There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing.”

“The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.”

“I'm disappointed in you, Adrian. I'm very disappointed. Reassembling myself was the first trick I learned. It didn't kill Osterman. Did you really think it would kill me? I have walked across the surface of the sun. I have witnessed events so tiny and so fast, they could hardly be said to have occurred at all. But you, Adrian, you're just a man. The world's smartest man poses no more threat to me than does its smartest termite.”