“A ship with two of every animal in the world, my friend? That would have to be a very large ship indeed. Is that how you would save a world? A bull and a cow, a sheep and a ram, and so on? The people who wrote your Torah, my friend, must have had poor livestock if they raised their herds from only one dam and one sire, breeding sisters with their brothers, any herdsman knows that this does not produce a healthy flock.No, my friend to save the world you save the knowledge of that world, the knowledge that there were bulls and cows in it, that there were sheep and rams in it, that there were men and women who lived and died. If your world is to be destroyed, all you can save my friend, is the knowledge of it, to restore what you once had, to mourn what can never be restored.”

“And so the twins had remained virgins. Julia and Valentina watched all of their high school and college friends disappear one by one into the adult world of sex, until they were the only people they knew who lingered in the world of the uninitiated. "What was it like?" they asked each friend. The answers were vague. Sex was a private joke: you had to be there.”

“your loved ones have been used to lure you into Kronos's traps. Your fatal flaw is personal loyalty Percy. You do not know when it is time to cut your losses. To save a friend you would sacrifice the world.”

“Listen to me, Amin," I said slowly. "Listen to me very carefully. Nothing is the same. Nothing will ever be the same again. There lives on this earth a woman who can be my friend and my lover. Do you understand that? Do you understand what a marvelous thing that is?""A friend is a friend," Uthman interrupted, "and a woman is a woman. You can't have them in one person. The whole world knows that.""If that's what the whole world knows, ...then the whole world is wrong. I believed the whole world, and I lost her.”

“You don’t read, you don’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like to live in different worlds, to travel on great adventures through the galaxy with people you know better than you know your own family. To live and die with them. These are my friends, my best friends in the world.”

“I want to tell my friends how beautiful / the world is. Not but what they know / it is terrible too--they know as well as I; / but nevertheless, I want to tell my friends. / Because they are. And this is what they are; / and because it is and this is what it is. / You are my friend. The world is beautiful. / Dear friend, you are. I want to tell you so.”