“…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. ""What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?”

“There will be no magic, whatsoever. Magic is either a poverty-stricken necessity or a wealthy fantasy. We are in neither of those straits, and what cannot be explained will be left unknown.”

“We are born in this cemetery, but must not despair.-Piet Soron, 1847”

“You live your life, you try to live compassionately, and that's the end of it. You do a little more than you should have to in order to be a good person, but you don't go making big changes in the world, trying to fix things. It presumes too much to do so. There's only this: if everyone acts quietly, compassionately, things will go a little better than they would have otherwise. But people will still suffer.”

“The action of a thing is the same as the naming of it - is, in fact, the real name. The trees creak and they are saying, 'trees creak through the long night.' The long night - what is it? Trees creaking. There wasn't anything that tied life's moments together, except life. And when it was gone?”

“Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?”

“If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.”