There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It… - Iain Banks

A good death. Well, he thought, given that you had to die, why want a bad one?

Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she’d initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy’s taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard.

The King liked happy endings. You couldn’t blame the ancients for coming up with unhappy conclusions so often—they each spent all their single short life waiting either for oblivion or some absurd after-death torture—but that didn’t mean you had to stick faithfully to their paralyzed paradigms and ruin a good story with a depressing dénouement.