“What I've started I must finish. I've gone too far to turn back. Regardless of what may happen, I have to go forward.”

“You must let what happens happen. Everything must be equal in your eyes, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, foolish and wise.”

“Bastian looked at the book.'I wonder,' he said to himself, 'what's in a book while it's closed. Oh, I know it's full of letters printed on paper, but all the same, something must be happening, because as soon as I open it, there's a whole story with people I don't know yet and all kinds of adventures, deeds and battles. And sometimes there are storms at sea, or it takes you to strange cities and countries. All those things are somehow shut in a book. Of course you have to read it to find out. But it's already there, that's the funny thing. I just wish I knew how it could be.'Suddenly an almost festive mood came over him.He settled himself down, picked up the book, opened it to the first page, and began to read...”

“No," he said in his deep, rumbling voice. "It means that you must do what you really and truly want. And nothing is more difficult.""What I really and truly want? What do you mean by that?""It's your own deepest secret and you yourself don't know it.""How can I find out?""By going the way of your wishes, from one to another, from first to last. It will take you to what you really and truly want.""That doesn't sound so hard," said Bastian."It is the most dangerous of all journeys.""Why?" Bastian asked. "I'm not afraid.""That isn't it," Grograman rumbled. "It requires the greatest honesty and vigilance, because there's no other journey on which it's so easy to lose yourself forever.”

“What will happen when my heart stops beating?" Momo asked.When that moment comes," said the professor, "time will stop for you as well. Or rather, you will retrace your steps through time, through all the days and nights, myths and years of your life, until you go out through the great, round, silver gate you entered by."What will I find on the other side?"The home of the music you've sometimes faintly heard in the distance, but by then you'll be part of it. You yourself will be a note in its mighty harmonies.”

“One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.”

“Nothing can happen more than once, but everything must happen one day; Over hill and dale, wood and stream, my dying voice will blow away. . .”