“Imagine how different a world might be if more leaders took time to ponder the finality of death before racing off to war.”

“If man's capacity for the fantastic took up as much of his imagination as his capacity for cruelty, the worlds, seen and unseen, might be very different.”

“How many times before I finally convince myself, how many private, erasable deaths will I need to die, how many self-murders is it going to take, how many times will I have to destroy myself before I learn, before I understand?”

“Death has more in common with Love than you might imagine.”

“I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.”

“Imagine what the world might have been like if Larry and Sergey instead became professors or took a job at Microsoft.”