“I like to smile at the men who look mean so they know I believe in their better selves. That makes a difference in the world. This is how you might be able to reform a possible rapist without ever ...”

“Twice I'd come home as they were finishing, and, honestly, I cannot think of a lonelier sound on a Saturday night than one's roommate having a giant orgasm and then making an embarrassed sssh sound...”

“With hand gestures, you can fill in a lot of gaps, and the words thing and stuff and -ness also help: patientness instead of patience, fastness instead of speed, honestness instead of honesty. With...”

“Now she and the widow had something in common, though loss did not pass from one person to another like a baton. It just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And she thought, scratching the...”

“That," she said, "is a little closer to how I imagine it works. Whether or not you pray has absolutely nothing to do with the person to your left. It's like saying you shouldn't get the moon in you...”

“After many years the woman died, of natural causes. And a few years after that, the ogre died. Eventually, his mistresses died, down on the ground, in the people village, over decades. The war men ...”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful, like the flowers, than large, conservative, repressed, fearful, and aggressive, like the thunder lizards; a lesson, by the way, tha...”

“Nothing but truth is immortal.”

“I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality.”

“It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory”

“Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain...”

“Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.”