“Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn't be, even if it was somwhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary.”

“Oh, why does compassion weaken us?'It doesn't, really ... Somewhere where it all balances out - don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? - if we could go there, you could see it doesn't. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.”

“Although when there were too many people around- which there certainly were today- it was hard even to remember to say thank you: all those people were like drowning.”

“So when a dragon is directly over you, well, even if you're me and you're kind of used to it, your medulla oblongata is still telling you 'the sky is falling, you're about to die, run like hell.”

“Tell me who you are. You need not tell me your name. Names have power, even human ones. Tell me where you live and what you do with your living.”

“I didn’t want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad.”

“It wasn't so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren't, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only question was whether we were handling our mastery well. (No. Next question.)”