“I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.”

“It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind.”

“The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”

“The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.”

“Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance cal...”

“The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.”

“Civilisation and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.”

“So the next day I asked Dan how is it that Bubba can get killed, and what kind of half assed nature law would allow that. He thought about it for a while, and said, 'Well, I'll tell you, Forrest, a...”

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.”

“Any society that produces twice as many lawyers as it does poets and preachers is doomed.”

“They had stopped shouting at each other and put their faith in legal counsel. With the result that how things could be made to look was what counted, not how they actually were.”

“Fangs are more pointed, and vampires use fangs to bite people on the neck.''Yech! Who'd want to do that?''Vampires would, that's who.''Wait a minute. I saw Mrs. Monroe bite Mr. Monroe on the neck o...”