“Funerals aren't for the dead. They're for the living.”

“Mr. Treadstone believed that there was always an apposite word. The English language, after all, was the richest in the world. If you couldnt find the apposite word, if you found your language slip...”

“If you had to relive your life exactly as it was same successes and failures, same happiness, same miseries, same mixture of comedy and tragedy would you want to? Was it worth it?”

“I knew that iridium-193 was one of two stable isotopes of iridium, a very rare, very dense metal, but I didn't know that the periodic table even existed.I knew how many zeroes there were in a quint...”

“They called our arrangement a 'Death Pact' - but, really, that's not a phrase that tells you anything important. It's just the kind of phrase that sells newspapers. For us, it was never about death...”

“It's possible to find order in chaos, and it's equally possible to find chaos underlying apparent order. Order and chaos are slippery concepts. They're like a set of twins who like to swap clothing...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”