Look, Jasper," Dad said as we settled on a bench. "Its about time you — Steve Toltz

"After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we dont have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!"

"Let me save you some time. There is no bottom. Despair is bottomless. Youll never get there, and thats why I know youll never kill yourself. Not you. Only those attached to the trivial things take their own lives, but you never will. You see, a person who reveres life and family and all that stuff, hell be the first to put his neck in a noose, but those who dont think too highly of their loves and possessions, those who know too well the lack of purpose of it all, theyre the ones who cant so it. Do you know what irony is? Well, you just heard one. If you believe in immortality, you can kill yourself, but if you feel that life is a brief flicker between two immense voids to which humanity is unfairly condemned, you wouldnt dare. Look, Marty, youre in an untenable situation. You dont have the resources to live a full life, yet you cant bring yourself to die. So what do you do?"

"You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue."

"Confronting your own assassin is a tricky business; you dont want to trigger your own murder just for the sake of getting something off your chest."

"Even ugly people know beauty when they dont see it."

"Most of my life I never worked out whether to pity, ignore, adore, judge, or murder my father. His mystifying behavior left me wavering right up until the end."