“My people never dreamed of a world like this. Of having so much without backbreaking, debilitating work. And yet for all the physical improvements, people are still people. They’re killing each other to get more to prove a point only the killer understands. Still brutalizing and torturing each other over things that in another hundred years won’t even matter.”

“It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.”

“The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.”

“It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about”

“People need something to worship, lad. They need a belief in something beyond this world. Look at it now. This world is in chaos. People are killing each other for conquest, stealing, bringing each other down whenever they get the chance. Believe it or not, most people know this in one way or another. Perhaps they don’t understand the magnitude, but they see that this world is anything but perfect. They need something that makes their comings and goings here worthwhile.”

“Remember that, lad, if you never remember anything else. We all touch each other's lives, for better or for worse. So say the things you have to say to people while you still have the chance.”