“Once people needed heaven and hell, Elysium and Faerie. They believed. Belief is the great creative force, the faith that moves mountains. If Someone had not believed in us, so they say, we would never have been born. I have spent my darkest hours wondering what kind of a Creator would have believed in me." Kal”

“The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe... Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.”

“So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: hell is other people.”

“Christians believe that God came amongst us as a man, do they not? Yet the Muselmen say he was only a prophet, and that God has no name...We fight and kill each other so readily, yet if I had been born in the East, would I not believe the stories they believe, and if they had been born here, would they not be Christians?”

“We always loved to say 'If I'd had a Monday-morning class, I never would have met you'. Or 'If you'd been reading something else, none of this would have happened'. We didn't believe in fate, but we believed in serendipity. We felt very lucky.”

“I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.”