“I'll say things that are serious and put them in a joke form so people can enjoy them. We laugh to keep from crying.”

“There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.”

“There are some things so serious that you have to laugh at them.”

“You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”

“It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.”

“An onion can make people cry, but there has never been a vegetable invented to make them laugh.”