“The more stories I study, the more I begin to suspect that there is only one story, and that we are, all of us, engaged in telling it.”

“The story I am going to tell has more than one beginning and without an end.”

“What do you know about yourself? What are your stories? The ones you tell yourself, and the ones told by others. All of us begin somewhere. Though I suppose the truth is that we begin more than once; we begin many times. Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.”

“[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry.”

“Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.”

“I remember my mother telling me earlier that we are nothing more than our stories. I look at the masses of dead flesh, at all the stories that are now forever silenced.”