“It's better to hope than mope!” — Margaret Atwood

time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.

Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I’ll be dead,” you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar.

You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.