“I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world.”

“Anyone who lives in her own world is crazy. Like schizophrenics, psychopaths, maniacs. I mean people who are different from others.'Like you?'On the other hand,' Zedka continued, pretending not to have heard the remark, 'you have Einstein, saying that there was no time or space, just a combination of the two. Or Columbus, insisting that on the other side of the world lay not an abyss but a continent. Or Edmund Hillary, convinced that a man could reach the top of Everest. Or the Beatles, who created an entirely different sort of music and dressed like people from another time. Those people--and thousands of others--all lived in their own world.”

“I pity the people who don't like to read, because then they spend their whole lives stuck in this one world and dont get to discover any others.”

“For all the people in the world who would die to have this power, kill to have it, I can’t persuade the two people whose lives actually matter to me to take it. And I can’t force it upon them. That is my sorrow.”

“There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence.”

“If I could die saving two lives, I would, provided each of those two people were the kind of people who would die to save two more like them.”