"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."

"The past, the future, life on other planets, everything is such a projection of life as we know it."

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create."

"When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option."

"People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become."

"We live and die and anything else is just delusion."

"Language... was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world."

"Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple."

"Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be."

"You tell me, what does it get you if you can square root a triangle and then some terrorist shoots you in the head?"

"If you're ever in a big hotel lobby, and they start to play 'The Blue Danube Waltz,' get the hell out. Don't think, run."

"The glue and resin smell in new cars is formaldehyde, she'd tell him, the same thing they use to preserve dead bodies."

"The diseases a mother can pass to her baby are : Toxoplasmosis, Other (meaning syphilis and HIV), Rubella, Cytomegalovirus, and Herpes. It helps if you can picture a mother passing the torch to her baby."

"A little muscle twitch means rabies, means muscle cramps, thrist, confusion, and drooling, followed by seizures, coma, death. Acne means ovarian cysts. Feeling a little tired means tuberculosis. Bloodshot eyes mean meningitis. Drowsiness is the first sign of typhoid. Those floaters you see cross your eyes on sunny days, they mean your retina is detaching. You're going blind."

"This is the world we live in. I've been there, taken the MCAT. The Medical College Admission Test. I went to the USC School of Medicine long enough to know that a mole is never just a mole. That a simple headache means brain tumors, means double vision, numbness, vomiting followed by seizures, drowsiness, death."

""The way to remember the symptoms of melanoma is the letters ABCD."

"The world won't end with a whimper or a bang, but with a discreet, tasteful announcement: 'Bill Rivervale, phone call holding, line two.' Then nothing."

"So if you think this is going to save you..."

"Just keep asking yourself: 'What would Jesus NOT do?'"

"...we simply speak with our wounds; wounds procreate..."

"...nature is motion and growth."

"" 'I would like to know how long this—how long this has been...' (going on, one presumes, or something equally banal, but then all ends are banal—hangings, the Nuremberg Old Maid's iron sting, shooting oneself, last words in the brand-new Ladore hospital, mistaking a drop of thirty thousand feet for the airplane's washroom, being poisoned by one's own wife, expecting a bit of Crimean hospitality...)"

"All he had wanted to say to Ada over the dumb dorophone amounted to three words in English, contractable to two in Russian, to one and a half in Italian..."

"One is irresistibly tempted to compare the strange longings and nauseous qualms that enter into the complicated ecstasies accompanying the making of a young writer's first book with childbearing. Van had only reached the bridal stage; then, to develop the metaphor, would come the sleeping car of messy defloration; then the first balcony of honeymoon breakfasts, with the first wasp."

"I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness...I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended."

"In other more deeply moral worlds than this pellet of muck, there might exist restraints, principles, transcendental consolations, and even a certain pride in making happy someone one does not really love; but on this planet, Lucettes are doomed."

"Speaking as a botanist and a mad woman, she said, the most extraordinary word in the English language was 'husked,' because it stood for opposite things, covered and uncovered, tightly husked but easily husked, meaning they peel off quite easily, you don't have to tear the waistband, you brute. 'Carefully husked brute,' said Van tenderly."

"'I did not mean to offend anybody by my cry of anguish.' 'Even anguish should be civil,' continued Van (while the better Van in him tugged at his sleeve, aghast and ashamed).'"

"Don’t laugh, my Ada, at our philosophic prose, all that matters just now is that I have given new life to Time by cutting off Siamese Space and the false future. My aim was to compose a kind of novella in the form of a treatise on the Texture of Time, an investigation of its veily substance, with illustrative metaphors gradually increasing, very gradually building up a logical love story, going from past to present, blossoming as a concrete story, and just as gradually reversing analogies and disintegrating again into bland abstraction."

"It did not matter, it did not matter. Destroy and forget! But a butterfly in the Park, an orchid in a shop window, would revive everything with a dazzling inward shock of despair."

"He could swear he did not look back, could not—by any optical chance, or in any prism—have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture...penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never."

"...thrushes were singing so richly, with such sonorous force, such fluty fioriture, that one could not endure the agony of consciousness, the filth of life, the loss, the loss, the loss. Gradually, however, he regained a semblance of self-control by the magic method of not allowing the image of Ada to come anywhere near his awareness of himself. This created a vacuum into which rushed a multitude of trivial reflections. A pantomime of rational thought."

"'But this,' exclaimed Ada, 'is certain, this is reality, this is pure fact—this forest, this moss, your hand, the ladybird on my leg, this cannot be taken away, can it? (it will, it was). This has all come together here, no matter how the paths twisted, and fooled each other, and got fouled up: they inevitably met here!'"

"'I am sentimental,' she said. 'I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.'"

"'Who cares,' cried Van, 'who cares about all those stale myths, what does it matter—Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts with bleached camel ribs? They are merely the dust and mirages of the communal mud.'"

"'I can never get used [...] to the contrast between the opulence of nature and the squalor of human life.'"

"Being unfamiliar with the itinerary of sun and shade in the clearing, he had left his bicycle to endure the blazing beams for at least three hours. Ada mounted it, uttered a yelp of pain, almost fell off, googled, recovered—and the rear tire burst with a comic bang."

"Now and then, when he detached his organs of locomotion from the lenient ground, and seemed actually to clap his hands in midair, in a miraculous parody of a jump, one wondered if this dreamy indolence of levitation was not a result of the earth’s canceling its pull in a fit of absentminded benevolence. Incidentally, one curious consequence of certain muscular changes and osteal "reclicks" caused by the special training was Van’s inability in later years to shrug his shoulders. Questions for study and discussion: 1. Did both palms leave the ground when Van, while reversed, seemed actually to skip on his hands? 2. Was Van’s adult incapacity to "shrug" things off only physical or did it "correspond" to some archetypal character of his "soul"? 3. Why did Ada burst into tears at the height of Van’s performance?"

"During the week following her birthday, Ada's unfortunate fingernails used to stay garnet-stained and after a particularly ecstatic, lost-to-the-world session of scratching, blood literally streamed down her shins—a pity to see, mused her distressed admirer, but at the same time disgracefully fascinating—for we are visitors and investigators in a strange universe, indeed, indeed."

"An individual's life consisted of certain classified things: 'real things' which were unfrequent and priceless, simply 'things' which formed the routine stuff of life; and 'ghost things,' also called 'fogs,' such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a 'tower,' or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a 'bridge.' 'Real towers' and 'real bridges' were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral 'thing' might look or even actually become 'real' or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid 'fog.' When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with 'ruined towers' and 'broken bridges.'"

"Refuting the determinist’s statement more elegantly: unconsciousness, far from awaiting us, with flyback and noose, somewhere ahead, envelops both the Past and the Present from all conceivable sides, being a character not of Time itself but of organic decline natural to all things whether conscious of Time or not. That I know others die is irrelevant to the case."