“I am cursed. Everybody around me dies. It just might take a hundred years for them to do so.”

“It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.”

“My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.”

“I’m willing to die for the woman I love. I just want to take 75 years to do it.”

“I’m so smart that I make everyone around me smarter. I do this by being dumber than everybody.
”

“I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don't want to them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it, too. I want them to be able to do whatever they want around me. And if they do something I don't like, I'll tell them.”