“A risk to own anything : a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around. Not enough shoes, cars, cigarettes. Too many people too few things. What there is must go into circ...”

“A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times.”

“You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.Im going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.”

“Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.”

“I don't know what you do about sex and I don't want to know, but this is not the way to go about it. You're what fifty-two? Do you think a young girl finds any pleasure in going to bed with a man ...”

“In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he bar...”

“But what was there to say?Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely t...”

“Trees quiver in the wind,sailing on a sea of mistout of earshot.”

“Just for future reference, don't use words like "love" anymore. It's a very sensitive word and it wears out quickly. Romeo barely says it, but John Hinckley filled up a whole journal with it. To pu...”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“This world has need of song and sword.”

“Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, sermons and soda water the day after.”

“I've passed up on many a thing that could have made me a big artist or something. Like, I was offered a feature on a Christina Aguilera song and I turned it down. It just wasn't right. She's cool, ...”