“All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.”

“He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.”

“Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.”

“The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you dont always get what you thought you were asking...”

“Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.”

“Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear.”

“once sailed neither the ship nor the shore ever remains the same again.”

“We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.”

“One day spent with someone you love can change everything.”

“Flexibility is the greatest strength.”

“What I always say is that Japanese are like willow. We can be bent easily, but once you try to break us, it would not be so easy.”

“When we arrived at my home north of the city, my five-year-old son Magnus, brimming with the confidence he'd gained in two full weeks of kindergarten, opened the front door and asked John, "Is it t...”

“You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and inte...”

“Intelligence minus purpose equals stupidity.”

“But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence ...”