“Everyone, he continued, wants his life to stand for something other than what it would, which is about eighty years in the West, at any rate eighty years of working, eating, sleeping, shitting, b...”

“No sight better expresses the politics of aid, the dynamics of the West and the developing countries, than the image of children, happy or in need.”

“Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know.”

“Its always nice to learn a thing or two from a novel, dont you think?”

“At every stage, the world that breaks in through our senses struggles to find a footing in our brains. We might liken memories to the messages recorded on tape, but we mistake the message for the m...”

“It is no consolation to reflect that every cause itself is an effect, making the search for causes and reasons a fools errand.”

“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...”