And I agreed, but still, she owed us an explanation. If she was up there, down there, out there, somewhere, maybe she would laugh.

And imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

me: you know what sucks about love? o.w.g.: what? me: that it's so tied to the truth. I know it sucks, but in a way, it's good....Love and truth being tied together, I mean. They make each other possible, you know?

Gus: "It tastes like..." Me: "Food." Gus: "Yes, precisely. It tastes like food, excellently prepared. But it does not taste, how do I put this delicately...?" Me: "It does not taste like God Himself cooked heaven into a series of five dishes which were then served to you accompanied by several luminous balls of fermented, bubbly plasma while actual and literal flower petals floated down around your canal-side dinner table." Gus: "Nicely phrased." Gus's father: "Our children are weird." My dad: "Nicely phrased."

Colin had always preferred baths; one of his general policies in life was never to do anything standing up that could just as easily be done lying down

Every second of your definitionally temporary consciousness, you are choosing how you spend something that will not last forever.

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.