“Now you’ve said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that’s all we ever talked about. We’d sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said ‘hopeless,’ though; that’s where we’d chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that’s when there’s nothing to do but take off. If you can”

“Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.”

“I wonder… because that’s all I can do. Silently wonder about the hopeless boy who somehow burrowed himself into the forefront of my thoughts and won’t go the hell away.”

“Did you see what we did?” Vine asked for the thousandth time. “That’s what I’m talking about! Those hell hounds were nothing. When do I get to face a wraith?”

“You are afraid of hell. But that’s all religion is, really. Fear of a place we’d rather not be, and where there’s no such a thing as suicide to steal us away.”

“There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down.She turned to me and said, "Oh! You're one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?""In physics," I said."Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can't talk about it.""On the contrary," I answered. "It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance--gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood--so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!"I don't know how they do it. There's a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it!”