“There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.”

“In a perfectly designed world —one with no history— we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.”

“If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”

“When one person gets cancer, the whole family gets cancer.”

“Alice's eyes fell to the bundle she carried. But she only said, 'People from the other side of the mirror want to know who and where and why and what is the name. They have to know everything. They are always gnawing at things and at one another.''It's good to want to know things,' Jack said defensively.'It is? What happens when there is no answer?' she sneered. 'Wanting-to-know is always biting at you. Biting and itching. You want to much. Go back to your own world. You don't belong here”

“What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion?”