“Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.”

“But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.”

“They really do have nothing in common on paper, these people and him. But yet there are so many common reference points; even some unexpected ones. . . .they all want to be cool. And they're all scared but no good at showing it. . . . [t]hey all know how to act cool. after all, life's pretty scary most of the time. And the number one skill you need out there is how to show no fear. . . . Stay calm. Don't let people see that you are shy or nervous. If you watch a horror film, remember to laugh. If someone else seems scared, laugh at them. In the real world, danger is either fantasy, in which case you laugh, or too real, in which case you ignore it.”

“War thoughts again. I think back to the business cards from that health shop earlier on. I think about miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves…Therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what’s it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is a part of my life too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy. -Hitler tried to impose his shiny, blonde, neat, sparkling world on us all and we resisted. So how is it that when McDonald’s and Disney and The Gap and L’Oreal and all the others try to do the same thing we all just say, ‘OK’? Hitler needed marketing, that’s all. His propaganda was, of course, brilliant for its time, everyone knows that. What a great idea, to make people feel that they belong to something, that their identity makes them special. If Hilter had bee able to enlist a twenty-first-century marketing department, would he have been able to sell Nazism to everyone? Why not? You can just see a beautiful, thin woman with her long blonde hair moving softly in the breezes, and the tagline ‘Because I’m worth it’.”

“What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.”

“I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.”

“Christopher, like most people, didn't like his universe being unfathomable, so I doubted that a Zen koan would help him.”