“She'll be your dance partner, Jordan""Her? She's much too good. I'm scared!""Remember the feeling. Someday you'll want to write about it, and then it'll be good to know how the fear feels and to go...”

“I don't know how many years it's been since I last slept with my husband. I was faithful, stupid and so awfully lonely that I'll gobble you up if you're nice to me. Or kill you because I can't bear...”

“We cannot decide to love. We cannot compel anyone to love us. There's no secret recipe, only love itself. And we are at its mercy--there's nothing we can do.”

“Oh, merciless freedom, you continue to overwhelm me! You demand that I challenge myself and feel ashamed, and yet continue to feel so outrageously proud to live a life full of my desires.”

“Yes, the woman." Cunco took a deep breath. "Women like her don't come along that often, you know. Maybe only every two hundred years. She everything a man could dream of. Beautiful, clever, wise, c...”

“[Women] are superior beings to us men. When they love us, then they are being gracious, for only rarely do we give them reason to love us. I learned that from your mother, and she's right. Sad to s...”

“Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are consider...”

“Language disguises thought.”

“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”

“If youre not afraid of working hard, self-reliance comes easy!”

“there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument - and that is to avoid it .”

“If you argue and rankle and contradict, you may achieve a victory sometimes; but it will be an empty victory because you will never get your opponent's good will.”

“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....”