"In this room, the salamander was squashed between the pages of the rhyming dictionary, thereby changing poetry forever. Here, Salome walked around with a big red fish held high up over her head. Old Father spanked her with a ballet slipper, sending her to bed without milk or honey. Dance was changed in this room, too."

"There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commenses, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour [...] our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection with space becomes as solid as bone."

"...that she was the one who'd made friends with the Snake, that she'd let it lick the blood of her first menstruation, that she … ooo eee, that she … ooo eee, that she … ooo, eee, that she now knew what the Serpent knew."

"There's no such thing as security in this life, sweetheart; and the sooner you accept that fact, the better off you'll be. The person who strives for security will never be free. The person who believes that she's found security will never reach paradise. What she mistakes for security is purgatory. You know what purgatory is, Gwendolyn? It's the waiting room, it's the lobby. Not only does she have the wrong libretto, she's stuck in the lobby where she can't see the show."

"Night, when tangos play on the nurse's radio and rat poison sings its own hot song behind the cellar door. Night, when the long snake feeds, when the black sedan cruises the pleasure districts, when neon flickers "Free at Last" in a dozen lost languages, and shapes left over from childhood move furtively behind the moon-dizzy boughs of the fir."

"Midnight, when the monotonous tick-tock of diurnal progress is for one throbbing moment replaced by the cool but smokey honk of a saxophone, alternately seductive and threatening. Midnight. The black growth on the clock face that has to be biopsied every twenty-four hours to see whether it is malignant or benign."

"It's a smile a girl could bring home to mother, if she had a mother; a smile a girl could pet like a pony, sip like a lemonade, hum like a popular tune; a smile a girl would feel safe with in a dark alley."

"Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines'."

"keep your eye on the ball, even if you cannot see the ball."

"Leave me in the night but please don't leave me in the dark"

"Not naive," Conch Shell had corrected him, "He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear."

"A person can't make a career out of somebody else's invective."

"...she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to perceive them, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it — which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call "sages," and those who act upon it, we call "artists.""

"Of the seven deadly sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter."

"In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak."

"The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict."

"Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide."

"...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell."

"The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously."

"It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes."

"To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought."

"They were old enough to know better. Some of them were old enough to remember when old Macdonald had a farm."

"Most snoring is composed by Beethoven or Wagner, although a few times Wiggs had heard heavy metal rock performed on the somnambulate bassoon."

"A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus."

"A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised."

"Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult."

"Water! Of all liquids on Earth, the only one chosen for scrubbin' and flushin'. The liquid they rinse baby's nappies in, the fluid that floods the gutters o' this cloud-squeezer town; a single drop o' water discolors a glass of Irish, and you, false friend, are wantin' me to pour this abrasive substance into me defenseless body!"

"I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o' cassette player if I'm not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affaction."

"There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition."

"Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich."

"My lunar sign is in Virgo. Every month when the moon is full, I'm driven to balance my checkbook and straighten up my apartment. I can't help myself. Instead of a werewolf I turn into an accountant."

"...the natural process of aging, which according to Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy, is so unnaturally cruel that only man could have ordained it — neither nature nor God would stoop so low."

"The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever."

"... overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between a German opera and a hockey game."

"She needed help, but God was in a meeting whenever she rang."

"Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand."

"If you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropiate port you find yourself docked."

"Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air — moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh — felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing."

"You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House."

"I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners."

"In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow."

"The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet he seems to connect the populace to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest."

"If you didn't serve the nasty fellow (God), the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down."

"Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic."

"Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard."

"Above the building, the sky recalled passages from Les Miserables, threadbare and gray."

"It is so amusing the way that mortals misunderstand the shape, or shapes, of time. … In the realms of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. … Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received."

"They glared at her the way any intelligent persons ought to glare when what they need is a smoke, a bite, a cup of coffee, a piece of ass, or a good fast-paced story, and all they're getting is philosophy."

"Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl's gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord's last pratfall, and after all that time we still don't know where passion goes when it goes."

"Who knows how to make love stay? Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."