“Of course if you stare at the sky long enough you're bound to get dizzy eventually...the key is harnessing that sense of displacement, never forgetting it, so as to enable one to employ it at will. Simply walking through life without a sense of physical, if not emotional, disembowelment, is not a life worth living.”

“If I could give you one key, and one key only to more abundant life, I would give you a sense of your own worth, an unshakeable sense of your own dignity as one grounded in the source of the cosmic dance, as one who plays a unique part in the unfolding of the story of the world…”

“Mum says be careful of boys who never take anything seriously. Dad says a boy needs a good sense of humor to get through his love life. Jazz says my dad must need a sense of humor to get through his love life if he's living in the shed”

“No one could ever truly be free as long as they loved, and life wasn't worth living without love. So freedom? Overrated.”

“It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.”

“Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartz had taught him, the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect. Then the days were sky-blue spaces you moved through with ease. You made sacrifices and the sacrifices made sense. You ate till you were full and then you drank SuperBoost, because every ounce of muscle meant something. You stoked the furnace, fed the machine. No matter how hard you worked, you could never feel harried or hurried, because you were doing what you wanted and so one moment simply produced the next.”