“Trane's playing is literally the most convincing proof of God's existence I've ever come across.”

“I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”

“Peter Van Houten was the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’slike to be dying, and (b) not have died.”

“What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a very playful way of acknowledging that and acknowledging that and that always, whenever we play, whenever we live, we are living in both literal and metaphorical ways on the memory and bones of the dead.”

“Not following her is the hardest thing I've ever done.”

“Therewill come a time,” I said, “when all of us aredead. All of us. There will come a time whenthere are no human beings remaining to rememberthat anyone ever existed or that ourspecies ever did anything. There will be noone left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra,let alone you. Everything that we did andbuilt and wrote and thought and discoveredwill be forgotten and all of this”—I gesturedencompassingly—“will have been for naught.Maybe that time is coming soon and maybeit is millions of years away, but even if wesurvive the collapse of our sun, we will notsurvive forever. There was time before organismsexperienced consciousness, andthere will be time after. And if the inevitabilityof human oblivion worries you, I encourageyou to ignore it. God knows that’s whateveryone else does.”

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”