“It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you.”

“Are you scared?’ asked Mr. Ibis.‘Not really.’‘Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand.”

“If you cut us, do we not bleed?' Mr. Vandemar pondered this for a moment, in the dark. Then he said with perfect accuracy, 'No.”

“It doesn't matter. Like the newspapers used to say, if the truth isn't big enough, you print the legend. This country needs its legends. And even the legends don't believe it anymore.”

“The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.”

“Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us.'I think...I said things to Silas. He'll be angry.''If he didn't care about you, you couldn't upset him,”

“And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.''They kill themselves, you mean?' said Bod. [...]'Indeed.''Does it work? Are they happier dead?''Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”