“Unicorns are man-eating monsters. They don't have wings, they aren't lavender or sparkly, and you could never catch one to ride without its goring you through the sternum. And even if it somehow managed to miss your major arteries-and it never misses-you'd still die from the deadly poison in its horn.”

“Don't worry chief,"said foaly,"It's like riding a unicorn,you never forget.”

“It's like learning to ride a unicorn. You never forget.”

“I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it's coming, and then it's still coming, and then it's already over, without ever having come.”

“When you are missing something you've left behind, it could be dead or lost so that you never find it again. You never really know, when you don't have something, what its condition is. That's why you grieve about it to the same degree- because you just don't know.”

“Dead bodies didn't resemble unconscious ones; it was as if you could sense that something had fled from them, that some essential spark was now missing.”