“... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.”

“that's what it was like waking up in the crypts. no-longer-dead. but without her.like burning alive.”

“Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.”

“We have possessed virtually nothing in our life in Italy. In England, I became increasingly sure that to possess something was to arrest your knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession. But there is an element of death in knowledge (...) Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost. It is the reliquary of the vanished object. Its presence is painful, because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.”

“Divine essence?' I said. 'Hey, I'm Fat Boy, I'll possess a guy and make him eat ten pounds of chocolate in one sitting! Yeah, that's divine, that's fucking deep, that's like ...' I couldn't think what that was like. It was like something, though.”

“For it falls outThat what we have we prize not to the worthWhiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost,Why, then we rack the value, then we findThe virtue that possession would not show usWhile it was ours.”