Quotes from "Random Shoes"

(Opening Voiceover) 
Eugene Jones: The speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second. Pain travels through the body at 350 feet per second. Even a sneeze can reach a hundred miles per hour. And as for life? Well... that just bloody whizzes by.

(Voiceover) 
Eugene: Now I had the eye and what I realised was if it fell from the sky, it probably, no, no, it almost certainly belonged to an alien. That was the night Dad went away. But it was okay, because I had the eye and the possibility of an alien encounter. I mean, if you leave something really important behind, you come back and get it. Don’t you? God, I wanted that alien to come back and claim his eye more than I wanted anything in my life. I worked out the possible provenance, the lifeform and galaxy, planetary escape velocities, launch windows, necessary fuel capacities and then, I waited.

Gwen: What was (Eugene) doing out on that road?
Owen: Oh, fuck knows. Categorising chevrons? He was a geek.

Gwen: Do you think Eugene committed suicide?
Tosh: There was a road accident and there was no alien involvement
Gwen: See, I'm not so sure because... something seems really odd. I mean I just, I just feel that there's something going on.
Owen: Marvelous, thank you for that Disney moment, now who's making the tea?
Gwen: Yeah well I suppose Eugene's a bit ordinary and local and amateur for you, Owen.
Owen: And why is that only Gwen seems to have a heart, yeah I dunno if you've noticed but the rest of us are human and amazingly we still manage to get on with our jobs

Josh: No disrespect, but Eugene had "loser" written through him like Brighton in a stick of rock. Maybe he just couldn’t live with his... failure.

(Voiceover) 
Eugene: Failure? Is that right? Has my life just been one big failure? I mean, maybe I never quite lived up to my early promise as a maths genius but that’s because I was waiting. For the alien to collect his eye and change my life.

Terry: (Eugene) may have been able to square the root of the frigging root, but he couldn't cross the frigging road.

Gwen: What exactly is, uh, a Sixth Eye, I mean, exactly?
Jack: It’s one in the back. Lets you see behind you, where you’ve been. Kind of puts things in perspective. It’s useful, fun, slightly terrifying. That’s why they were in demand.

Josh: I checked the bid history; Mr. C. Blackstaff is a collector of alien ephemera and Nazi memorabilia. Also Beanie Babies. Teeny bit cuckoo, but endearingly rich.

(Voiceover) 
Eugene: All those cars. All those lives moving through space. All that humanity whizzing by in a frenzy of burgers and chips, Bank Holiday fun, burst tyres, screaming kids, sudden heart attacks. Now I remember. Apart from a buzzing in my ear, where Josh whacked me, I felt good. I was running across a field on a Saturday morning, the smell of exhaust and banana milkshake, a slight nausea, heart beating too fast 'cause I wasn't that fit; all the stuff that tells you you're alive. By rights, I should be well pissed off. My mates had cheated on me and I didn’t get to meet any aliens. But I realised that when I swallowed the eye at the Happy Cook, I was given a chance to look back on my life and see it for what it really was.

Eugene: You know, twenty-eight is one of those perfect numbers. It’s equal to the sum of its divisors. I’m twenty-eight. I was twenty-eight. I think I’m going to have to go soon, Gwen.

(Voiceover) 
Eugene: In an average lifetime, the human heart will beat two million times. You’ll produce over eight thousand gallons of saliva and grow three-hundred-and-fifty miles of hair. You’ll eat the equivalent in weight of six elephants. Oh, isn’t life amazing?

(Voiceover)
Eugene: The average life is full of near misses and absolute hits, of great love and small disasters. It's made up of banana milkshakes, loft insulation, and random shoes. It's dead ordinary and truly truly amazing. What you've got to realise is it's all here now. So breathe deep and swallow it whole because take it from me, life just whizzes by.