“One aspect of perfection, after all, it stands to reason, will be that our need for imperfection will cease. Or, perhaps more precisely: that imperfection itself will cease to have meaning.”

“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.”

“Everything ends, and Everything matters. Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got…and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.”

“Here's to loving for that long, too, and loving perfectly, without error or sorrow, held forever on the edge of madness by our desire, but never tumbling over. Salud.”

“You could not be more correct. It does matter. All of it.”

“Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out.”

“Neither of us looking for an apology, or to be proven right at the other's expense. No anxiety to make it better than it was, no yearning towards something more. No dramatic conclusion at all. Just an array of loose ends, wrapped in a bundle of memories, all tied together with a sinew of regret - regret that we could both ultimately live with.”