"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."
"I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."
"So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo."
"Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency."
"Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."
"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."