“and you and I left with the same old question the sheer unspeakable strangeness of being here at all ”

“The pure power of a life can manifest as beatitude, or as an unspeakable, sheer violence...”

“To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.”

“Who there, Tobias," says the man to my left. "Werent' you raised a Stiff? I thought the most you peole did was graze hands or something." "Then how do you explain all the Abnegation children?" Tobias raises his eyebrows. "They're brought into being by sheer force of will,”

“As an atheist, I believe that all life is unspeakably precious, because it’s only here for a brief moment, a flare against the dark, and then it’s gone forever.”

“What is there left for me after my purgatory of solitude?...I welcome death as a version of life in which I will not be myself. There is a fallacy here which I ought to see but will not. For when I wake on the ocean floor it will be the same old voice that drones out of me...”