“The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.”

“he could feel the earth beneath, all the deep stone of it, cool and hard near the surface of the earth, but hotter and softer as you went deep, until it flowed like honey, a vast sweet fiery ocean of molten rock a thousand times more voluminous and ten thousand times heavier than the sea. It felt to him as if it were his own blood, and his heart pumped it.”

“Scholars don't have blood flowing in their veins," said Hamlet. "When they're wounded, they bleed logic, and when all of it is gone, their brains die, and they become ... soldiers.”

“Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.”

“Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?”

“So I want to ask you a hypothetical question.My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.”

“How much time? Not as much as I had yesterday.”