“It's idiotic, it's crazy. If you die and then you're just nothing, there isn't any point to anything. Why do we live at all if we die and stop being? Father wasn't ready to be stopped. No one's ready to be stopped. We don't have *time* to be ready to be stopped. It's all crazy. . . . Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but *he* is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.”

“Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but he is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.”

“Commitment. That's what it's all about. Taking that convenant together. Bonding yourselves for all eternity. Isn't that what we are all looking for? Maybe Alexander wasn't ready to do that with me, but it's obvious he isn't ready to do that with you, either.”

“I can't stop thinking about dying the way humans do it. Imagine! If at any moment, you could just stop existing. How different everything would be.." They don't stop existing Lenia said...They have souls that live forever. Even knowing that, they fight so hard to stay alive. I think it's so beautiful. Imagine: being that fragile, that permanent.”

“I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.”

“It struck me that the beauty we attribute to children isn’t something they have that we don’t. It's something they do, which we have long since stopped doing—just describing things as we see them, the simple, unadorned facts.”