“The patrists poison themselves. The matrists tend to decay, which is merely another kind of poison.”

“Does anyone ask a painter -- even the painter himself -- why he paints? Now me, I painted... used to... whatever I saw that was beautiful. It had to be beautiful to me, through and through, before ...”

“Why do you talk all the time? I asked. It was a rhetorical question, but she cocked her head on one side and considered it carefully.I think its cause I dont know any big words, like you and Mummy,...”

“I thumped her on the back, picked her up and dropped her on top of her dungarees. Put them pants on, I said, and be a man. She did, but she cried quietly until I shook her and said gently, Stop it ...”

“We are now in a position to determine just what sort of science fiction story this really is.”

“Why on earth do you carry a mirror around with you? It's purely a defensive device. We seldom quarrel, and this is one of the reasons. Can you imagine yourself getting all worked up and contorted a...”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“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...”