“What if … what if … what if … I play the What If? game all the time. But it’s rigged, is the thing. Impossible to win. Asking What If? can only lead to Maybe Things Could Have Been Different, via Was It My Fault?”

“Nothing is forever. Except atoms.”

“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (…) To games or needles, to some other person.”

“This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions ‘why’ and ‘to what’ grow real beaks and claws.”