“He forgot about me almost as soon as I disappeared from sight.”

“At the bakery it's just me. It's a small place. Just me and the raspberry horns and the tourtiere pies and my cigarette going in the ashtray near the black sink. Every once in a while a car passes through the dark street outside the storefont windows, but that's pretty much all I see of people while I'm there, until the end of my shift at eight when Monica shows up to open the store for the day. A solid twelve hours by myself, nothing but the radio to keep me company, and I like it just fine, being alone. It's even better in the winter, during a storm, when the snow piles up outside and no cars come by at all. Inside the bakery it's warm and there's plenty to keep my hands busy. Times like that, for all I can tell I'm the only person left on earth. I could go on making pies and watching the snow pile up until the end of time, so long as there was enough coffee on hand. I don't need company like some people seem to.”

“...no one likes change unless it is from sommething bad to something good...”

“Don't repackage your fear and try to sell it to me as indifference.”

“In no time we roll into Sedona proper and find a Cirlce K. The place is full of men with silver ponytails and ratty sandals, old hippie women in loose flowing pants grinning vacantly as they molest the produce, and I am reminded of my old neighborhood in San Francisco. We buy enough fruit and bread and jerked meat for three days, as well as a couple spare handlers of SoCo and a big bottle of cheap Chianti for me. As I'm paying I wonder at how we cling so relentlessly to the little conventions like commerce, as though they can save us.”

“There will likely be one important difference between corporeal suicide and digital suicide. Right now, one cannot destroy oneself utterly. We can blow our heads off, get the chatter to stop and cease having to pay bills, but we persist in the minds of those who knew and loved us. We continue to appear to them, unbidden, in myriad ways. They recall our smiles, hear our voices, jolt from frightening dreams and reach for us on reflex before remembering that we are no longer there. Until they themselves are gone, they continue to suffer the chafing pang of our absence.But when we all exist as pure thought, we can be deleted not just from ourselves, but from the minds of everyone. With a keystroke (or its post-Singularity equivalent) parents will be spared grief, lovers loneliness, friends the pain of having known and knowing no longer. When we choose suicide, we will choose not merely to destroy ourselves, but to never have existed. In this way, the one compelling argument against suicide―the anguish it causes to those left behind―will be eliminated.”

“I am not your God. Or if I am, I'm no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I'm the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry.”