“We cry for ourselves, don't we? Not for the dead. The dead are past caring.”

“We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.”

“So now, I look at these stories, and almost like a photograph snapped at a party, I find all manner of signs and indications of who I was. Was? Yes, was. I look at these pieces and I don't think the man who wrote them is alive in me anymore. Writing an introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Weaveworld last year I remarked on much of the same thing: the man who'd written that book was no longer around. He'd died in me, was buried in me. We are our own graveyards; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we're neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.”

“We’re too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are, in case we are nothing, and holding on so tight, we lose everything else.”

“Who can call a man dead whose words still hush and whose sentiments move?”

“We made our choice, he said. We hunted for them, we guarded their brats. God knows, we helped them make a civilization, didn't we? And why? I said I didn't know; it was beyond me. Because, he said, we thought they knew how to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers.”

“Behind their eyes the hope was sickening and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been.”