“He was impolite while making a point? This is Vlad the Impaler. His points usually come at the end of a long pole.”

“I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.”

“There is no such thing as a happy ending. Every culture has a maxim that makes this point, while nowhere in the Universe is there a single gravestone that reads 'He Loved Everything About His Life, Especially the Dying Bit at the End'.”

“It doesn't have to be logical, it doesn't have to be love in the usual sense. It doesn't even have to be long lasting. Usually it isn't. But whatever it is, it is real and powerful while it lasts, and there's no point denying it.”

“A bird named Vlad the Impaler, who spent the bulk of his life hissing and looking at himself in a little mirror hanging[...] in the iron cage, a mirror so dull and cloudy with Vlad the Impaler’s bird-spit that Vlad the Impaler could not possibly have seen anything more than a vague yellowish blob behind a pane of mist[...] A bird that not infrequently literally bit the hand that fed it, before returning to dance in front of its own shapeless reflection, straining and contorting always for a better view of itself.”

“Life is complicated. It wtarts before we're ready, it continues while we're still trying to figure out the point of it. And it ends long before we've worked out just what to do.”