“What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?”

“You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”

“I am the most miserable person who ever lived," he said... "You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.”

“You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.”

“There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.

“Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.”

“Biting's excellent. It's like kissing - only there is a winner.”

“I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

“People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.”

“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”

“The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.”

“Words save our lives, sometimes.”

“I hope you'll make mistakes. If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something.”

“Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”

“Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.”

“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?”

“That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.”

“Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea?”

“Libraries are our friends.”

“You don't have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.”

“Black as night, sweet as sin.”

“You can't trust other people. If it's important, you have to do it yourself.”

“It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.”

“Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.”

“You don't have to stay anywhere forever.”

“If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.”

“Not only are there no happy endings,' she told him, 'there aren't even any endings.”

“We owe it to each other to tell stories.”

It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

[...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.

...I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.

Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.

When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.

You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.

The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else.

What went wrong? Nothing and everything.

It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself

You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.

What really matters is what you like, not what you are like

So now what? What happens when words fail us?

There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.

So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.

She thought I was...soulful, by which I think she means that I don't say much and I always look vaguely pissed off.

The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.

I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.

It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.