“There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.”

“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.”

“History is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.”

“This isn't about love and hate," Helen says. It's about control. People don't sit down and read a poem to kill their child. They just want the child tosleep. They just want to dominate. No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have your own way. The masochist bullies the sadist intoaction. The most passive person is actually an aggressor.”

“There's worse that people can steal from you than money.”

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.”

“I suppose it’s comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse things to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict.”