“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a...”

“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”

“He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who's learned to love the sensation of being pierced.”

“Im not this unusual, she said. Its just my hair.She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at o...”

“I wanted a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my father's daughter. I wanted to be loved by someone like my to...”

“Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want.""What do we want?" I asked blurrily."Aw, man, you know," he said. "We ju...”

“Ive always believed that, as long as were left alone to do what were good at, and be who weve decided to be, things will turn out all right in the end. Now, me being strapped to a chair, unable to ...”

“For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, We came in peace for all Mankind. As th...”

“It's going to happen soon, a nuclear war. Someday, somewhere, some jackass politician will get in over his head and push the button, and us? Society? We haven't really grasped the full reality of t...”

“You can never stay angry too long in the bush though. At least, that's what I think. It's not that it's soothing or restful, because it's not. What it does for me is get inside my body, inside my b...”

“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

“Back in the day, it was either both a mother and her daughter had pubic hair, or the daughter didnt. Today, in many a case, the mother is the one who doesnt.”

“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to ...”

“You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physica...”

“If you go to Singapore or Amsterdam or Seoul or Buenos Aires or Islamabad or Johannesburg or Tampa or Istanbul or Kyoto, you'll find that the people differ wildly in the way they dress, in their ma...”