[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There’s no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.

Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur.