“Giving, not trading or selling, is the basis of success. The most rewarding thing you can do is just to give the world something good. And ultimately you will be paid so much more for that gift than it you had tried to trade it for something else.”

“Life can be so good if you let it. But you must trade with life. You give something and you get something, then you give something of yourself again and you receive something again. Life goes bad when people try to take from it without giving. Then they came away empty-handed, and they grab harder and more often, growing more disappointed and disillusioned each time.”

“You have a skill. You can do something no one else can,” Barron says. “Seriously. You know what’s good about that? It’s valuable. As in you can trade it for goods or services. Or money. Remember when I said it was wasted on you? I was so right.”

“If you give to get something, you’re not giving, you’re trading. Your motives are second in importance only to your actions”

“If you know something bad is coming, can't you plan to avoid it or try to do something differently?" said Charles.Probably", said the Cartographer, "but then the good events would have no flavor. The joy you find in life is paid for by suffering that comes later, just as sometimes, the suffering is redeemed by a joy unexpected. That's the trade that makes a life worth living.”

“Yeah, obviously we use vampires as a metaphor for something else, something deeper than just the supernatural. But there's just something about the bloodsucking walking dead, that can say so much to people. There are really so many people trying to get control over you on a daily basis and steal your soul in some way, take a part of you..”