“My parents danced together, her head on his chest. Both had their eyes closed. They seemed so perfectly content. If you can find someone like that, someone who you can hold and close your eyes to t...”

“I have known her longer, my smile said. True, you have been inside the circle of her arms, tasted her mouth, felt the warmth of her, and that is something I have never had. But there is a part of h...”

“There are so many men, all endlessly attempting to sweep me off my feet. And there is one of you, trying just the opposite. Making sure my feet are firm beneath me, lest I fall.”

“Denna is a wild thing," I explained. "Like a hind or a summer storm. If a storm blows down your house, or breaks a tree, you don't say the storm was mean. It was cruel. It acted according to its na...”

“Sought we the Scrivani word-work of SurthurLong-lost in ledger all hope forgotten.Yet fast-found for friendship fair the book-bringerHot comes the huntress Fela, flushed with findingBreathless her ...”

“It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own...”

“In my opinion, it was chiefly owing to their deep contemplation in their silent retreats in the days of youth that the old Indian orators acquired the habit of carefully arranging their thoughts.Th...”

“To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but that an equally great one is to know the right moment to stop.”

“Joel Cairo: You always have a very smooth explanation ready.Sam Spade: What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?”

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

“Trust starts with truth and ends with truth.”

“And an unaware witch means a witch who doesn't know she's a witch, and because she's a women that makes her double trouble. Never trust a women." My mothers a women," I said, suddenly feeling a lit...”

“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....”