“Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn't actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.”

“I'm a talentless but popular young singer and I have the feeling someone is watching me. I use the term loosely because I have few feelings, and even they're too simple, like primary colors.”

“When I started writingI was a sick teenagedfuck inside who partlythought I was the newMarquis de Sade, a bodydoomed to communicatewith Satan who was us-ing my sickness as hishome away from home,and there’s your proof.”

“A friend once asked me why it was that stories about animals and their heroism...are so compelling....we love them because they're the closest thing we have to material evidence of an objective moral order--or, to put it another way, they're the closest thing we have to proof of the existence of God. They seem to prove that the things that matter to and move us the most--things like love, courage, loyalty, altruism--aren't just ideas we made up from nothing. To see them demonstrated in other animals proves they're real things, that they exist in the world independently of what humans invent and tell each other in the form of myth or fable.”

“Do you know what it is?' [Toby] said thoughtfully. 'It's that they haven't had anything really awful happen to them. No wonder they seem so superficial and unfeeling.' It was certainly an interesting theory, ... [but] surely one didn't need to have suffered in order to possess empathy for those who had? All it required was a bit of imagination and a well-stocked library.”

“She touched something deep in his soul. He didn't believe in love at first sight, but the thought of hurting her made his chest ache.”

“That's something like the sensation of losing someone. You are never in your life so alive, and so aware of being alive, yet so isolated and abandoned, as when a loved one is taken from you. The planet will move right through you like wind through stalks of grass.”