“No one dies of nausea, but it can seriously sap the will to live.”

“Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born.”

“I am magical: I can bleed for five days and not die.”

“Let that be a reminder to you that the past is one thing, but what we make of it, the conclusions we draw, is another. History can be many things, depending on how we read it, just as the future can be many things, depending on how we live it. There is no inevitability to any historical occurrence, only what people will allow to take place. And it is by dreaming first that we get to new realities.”

“If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.”

“Without a driver this bus is lost. Our lives are over. Come aboard if your destination is oblivion - it should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat, if you want. But it's a sad view.”

“There are many examples of animals coming to surprising living arrangements...where an animal takes a human being or another animal to be one of it's kind.”