“There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.”

“Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.”

“All the shitty stuff people do to themselves... it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself.”

“Eliminate something superfluous from your life.Break a habit.Do something that makes you feel insecure.Carry out an action with complete attention and intensity, as if it were your last.”

“I suppose I should wish you success, but that is too easy. I would like to wish you something that is harder to come by. So I am going to wish you meaning in life. And meaning is not something you stumble across like the answer to a riddle or prize in a treasure hunt.Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you; out of your own talent and understanding, out of things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something, the ingredients are there.You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account. ”

“I know vaudeville isn't supposed to be art. It's supposed to be entertainment, which is different. But I think art...I think it's making something from nothing, basically. It's taking something as simple as movement, or a few notes, or steps, or words, and putting them all together so that they're bigger than what they ever could have been separate. They're transformed. And just witnessing that transformation changes you. It reaches into your insides and moves things around. It's magic, of a sort. I never really knew that until I saw your act. But when you walked out on that stage, I knew I was seeing something...different. Something maybe more amazing than what the professor and Silenus had done. You were making something up there, out of just the simplest elements possible, and seeing it changed something in me. I'd never encountered anything like that.”