“Religion is still the very best way to get someone to accept something unabashedly ridiculous.”

“New York is the one place in the world that actively encourages rudeness, because that's the only way to get past the fake bag carriers, homeless people, newspaper thieves, Jesus freaks, and everyone else who wants something and isn't afraid to ask for it, repeatedly, at close range.”

“(As a side note: I thought money was a bad idea way back when it was first invented. I remember the moment very clearly. This guy owed me a sheep, but instead of giving me an actual sheep he gave me five coins he said were worth the same as a sheep. "But I can't eat round pieces of metal, asshole," were my exact words.)”

“Morning conversations should be between very close friends or lovers, and otherwise avoided entirely.”

“The thing is, we all have a little animal in us, and if you ask us to, we can do a very good job of behaving like one.”

“...while there may have been gods, they weren't particularly well defined. If, for instance, something unusually lucky happened, one might declare that a god--pick one--was feeling generous that day. And if a particularly bad thing happened, a god (usually a different one) was upset about something or other. Gods, in other words, were what most of us would now call chance or luck. And in that sense they served their purpose, by making a random existence seem less random.”

“Karyos's people adopted an ingenious, if somewhat perplexing attitude that life was a circle. Not like Disney's circle of life thing, which was really just a nice way to say, "death is normal, children, so suck it up.”