Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.

A clear conscience is generally the result of a faulty memory, not a faulty life.

To be alive was to be disappointed. You tried and failed and kept on trying, never knowing whether you'd ever get what you wanted. But sometimes we get what we need.

Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.

There's more to me, more to the universe, than I suspected. Room for all the dreams I ever had, and all the nightmares...heroes in the gutters and in the mirror; saints in the frozen wasteland; fools and liars on the throne of wisdom, and hands reaching out in hunger that will never be filled.

And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large.

Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.