For a while Bastian stood motionless. He was so stunned by what he had just heard that he couldn't decide what to do... What he had hoped was his ruin and what he had feared his salvation.

Without a past you can't have a future.

Nothing can happen more than once, but everything must happen one day; Over hill and dale, wood and stream, my dying voice will blow away. . .

Wishes cannot be summoned up or kept away at will. They come from deeper within us than good or bad intentions. And they spring up unannounced.

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.

People? People have been obsolete for years, They've made the world a place where there's no room left for their own kind.

If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless. If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next.