“Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears...”

“Lonnie's monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you...”

“Last summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French an...”

“People who are ordinarily understood to dislike each other or at least to be indifferent toward each other discover that they have much in common.”

“Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff - tell them of his dif...”

“In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.”

“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?”

“[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have ...”

“Front grace in the shadows”

“People from the past, have a tendency to walk back into the present, and run over the future.”

“Do you want this to be a love story?”

“It's all talk til it's all real walk.”

“Some things are only real because they represent what we think. When we learn the truth and think it, the old reality is no longer real to us and loses its hold on us. The truth sets us free.”