“You eternals have long lives, but short memories. The changing people have short lives, but we do not forget.”

“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.”

“We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.”

“Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commit acts they would otherwise find repulsive. 'The devil made me do it.' I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them.”

“You are alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change.”

“You're alive, that means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change.”

“It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.”