“Our obsession with each other was like the isolation that comes with great pain; it was like extreme sadness. Without our children we might have never discovered our differences, which is what has made our abiding love for each other possible.”

“One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, I hope that you will love me for no good reason. But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another – to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers. Especially to strangers, who have neither good nor bad reasons to love us. And it’s why we tell each other stories that we pray will be transformed in the telling by that angel on the roof, made believable and about us all, no matter who we are to one another and who we are not.”

“They were totally alone, those kids, like each had been accidentally sent to earth from a distant planet to live among adult humans and be dependent on them for everything because compared to the adult humans they were extremely fragile creatures and didn't know the language or how anything here worked and hadn't arrived with any money. And because they were like forbidden by the humans to use their old language they'd forgotten it so they couldn't be much company or help to each other either. They couldn't even talk about the old days and so pretty soon they forgot there ever were any old days and all there was now was life on earth with adult humans who called them children and acted toward them like they owned them and like they were objects not living creatures with souls.”

“Knowledge of the facts of Bob's life and death changes nothing in the world. Our celebrating his life and grieving over his death, however, will. Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives - no, especially wholly invented lives - deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book's objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.”

“Life cannot remain tolerable unless we learn to let each other alone in all matters that are not of immediate and obvious concern to the community. We must learn to respect each other’s privacy, and not to impose our moral standards upon each other. The Puritan imagines that his moral standard is THE moral standard; he does not realize that other ages and other countries, and even other groups in his own country, have moral standard different from his, to which they have as good a right as he has to his.”

“Hugo and I yield entirely to each other. We cannot be without each other, we cannot endure discord, war, estrangement, we cannot take walks alone, we do not like to travel without each other. We have yielded in spite of our individualism, our hatred of intimacy. We have absorbed our egocentric selves into our love. Our love is our ego.”

“What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.”