“The glue between the horn that pushes and the sinew that pulls. The glue gets ignored, but you know, Ahai, up to half of a bow is glue. I suspect Ogodoi is the son I can least afford to lose.”

“In the rare air of that altitude he forgot he was he. One way or another that was the aim of life. Shamans flew outside the self in ecstasy. Other people found love, or causes.”

“Tchingis, if you determine this is to be so, who can withstand you? You are poetry after an ugly day, and heal wounds I didn't know I had.”

“Such coincidences were the rhymes that God wrote into fate, his chords of music.”

“He only knows a single thing to clasp, that like God can't be split up into pieces: our honesty to one another.”

“I am a neighbour king to stretch my branches over him, just as Toghrul sheltered me when I was a weed-stalk next to a strong tree.”

“Even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished animals in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them ...”

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

“Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.”

“One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.”

“Everybody has a home team: Its the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. Its the people who, near or far, know everything thats wrong with you and love you an...”

“The more you condemn yourself for thinking or feeling a certain way, the more you feel stuck within your own body and mind.. What if you went the other way and embraced it so totally that it was as...”

“One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts- just mere thoughts- are as powerful as electric batteries- as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as...”

“I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.”

“Iron turns red when it corrodes, and copper turns green. Meat turns to maggots, and thoughts turn to speech.”