“Death, he had come to believe, was a corrosive thing, and the more he was around it , the more it gnawed away at who he was.”

“he'd once believed that the answer lay somehow in themusic he created, he suspected now that He'd been mistaken. The more he thought about it, the more he'd come to realize that for him, music had always been a movement away from reality rather than a means of living in it more deeply. .. he now knew that burying himself in music had less to do with God than a selfish desire to escape.”

“a man there was, though some did count him mad, the more he cast away the more he had.”

“He reflected that what is important is not things, but the meaning we give to things. Sooner or later death comes for everyone. More important than putting off death, is giving it a meaning.”

“It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.”

“For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.”