“You have a good cry, lovey, you'll feel better afterwards. You did feel better afterwards, but as if you'd conned yourself, fobbed yourself off.”

“You can't blame me. I mean that literally. You're incapable of blaming me. You're human. Being human is choosing freedom over imprisonment, autonomy over dependency, liberty over servitude. You can't blame me because you know (come on, man, you've always known) that the idea of spending eternity with nothing to do except praise God is utterly unappealing. You'd be catatonic after an hour. Heaven's a swiz because to get in you have to leave yourself outside. You can't blame me because -- now do please be honest with yourself for once -- you'd have left, too.”

“You save yourself. That's all. You save yourself, or you're damned.”

“I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.”

“You don't believe in the soul until you feel it straining to escape the body.”

“It is, you must concede, unpleasantly messy, this business of having feelings, this mattering to each other. I've always thought of it as gory, a sort of perpetually occurring road accident - everyone going too fast, too close, without due care and attention, or with too much . . .”

“When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.”