"I want to know but I can't see are you up there. I don't have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to"

"Perhaps it's good you're not going to write anymore: you'd have to start considering all those dull things like your relation to your audience, the relation between your personality and your poetry, the relation between your poetry and all the poetry before it."

"The parts I like, well..." He shook his head, with pursed lips. "They just don't have anything to do with me: somebody else wrote them, it seems, about things I may have thought about once. The parts I don't like--well, I can remember writing those, oh yeah, word by word by word."

"to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name. The in-dark answered with wind."

"Yeah, nigger, you better grin. Niggers can't smile in this book. (p. 87)"

"Always remember the objects you are working with. When you make a bridge, remember you are putting steel on stone and dirt. … Some day you will write poems to a little girl: marks with ink on paper. … When you are making love, you are moving flesh against flesh. That is the basis of all magic. (p. 30)"

"We have done a tiny bit to free the darkies in this country. But the devil is still very much our slave. (p. 60)"

"It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind. (p. 163)"

"If everything, everything were known, statistical estimates would be unnecessary. The science of probability gives mathematical expression to our ignorance, not to our wisdom."

"The inevitable is that unprepared for."

"Don’t go chattering to the stars if you’re going to do it with your eyes closed."

"The rich are always enamored of the ancient."

"There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three."

"You know, Mouse, I envy the captain. He’s got a mission. And his obsession precludes all that wondering about what other people think of him."

"“I was born,” the Mouse said. “I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you.”"

"The captain is different too, Cyana. Before, the Roc flew under half a man, a man who’d only known victory. Now I’m a whole man. I know defeat as well."

"“What do you see, Captain?” “Two boys with hands locked for a fight. You see how one is light and the other is dark? I see love against death, light against darkness, chaos against order. I see the clash of all opposites under...the sun. I see Prince and myself.” “Which is which?” “I don’t know, Mouse.”"

"Bear in mind that the novel—no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective—is always a historical projection of its own time."

"Dull grown-ups and bright children form a particularly tolerant friendship."

"You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough."

"Oh, for the rebirth of an educational system where understanding was an essential part of knowledge."

"“Gods are nothing but low blood sugar,” I said. “St. Augustine, Peyote Indians…you know how it works—"

"Sincerity is my favorite form of belligerence."

"All right. I’m not opposed to reality imitating art if it doesn’t get in the way."

"As morning branded the sea, darkness fell away at the far side of the beach. I turned to follow it."

"Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman."

"“You're living in the real world now,” Spider said sadly. “It’s come from something. It’s going to something. Myths always lie in the most difficult places to ignore.”"

"Earth, the world, the fifth planet from the sun—the species that stands on two legs and roams this thin wet crust: it’s changing, Lobey. It’s not the same. Some people walk under the sun and accept that change, others close their eyes, clap their hands to their ears, and deny the world with their tongues."

"I must remember my own origins. Once I was as ignorant as you; I swear, though, I can’t remember when."

"Difference is the foundation of those buildings, the pilings beneath the docks, tangled in the roots of the trees. Half the place was built on it. The other half couldn’t live without it. But to talk about it in public reveals you to be ill-mannered and vulgar."

"It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfections on to another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies."

"You're not looking for me, you know. I'm looking for you."

"If you're going to do something stupid—and we all do—it might as well be a brave and foolish thing."

"“All life is a rhythm,” she said as I sat up. “All death is rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes.”"

"In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next."

"“What are you doing here?” I asked at last. “Probably the same thing you are.” “What’s that?” She looked serious. “Why don’t you tell me?” I went back to my knife. “Sharpening my machete.” “I'm sharpening my mind,” she said. “There is something to be done that will require an edge on both.”"

"Whoever heard of La-ing or Lo-ing somebody you’re herding goats with, or laughing with, or making love with."

"“The beginning of the end, the beginning of the end,” muttered Lo Hawk. “We must preserve something.” “The end of the beginning,” sighed La Dire. “Everything must change.”"

"I want to talk about love. Loving someone...I mean really loving someone...means you are willing to admit that the person you love is not what you first fell in love with, not the image you first had; and you must be able to like them still for being as close to that image as they are, and avoid disliking them for being so far away."

"You have to grow all the time," I said. "Not necessarily get bigger. But inside your head you have to grow, kid-boy. For us human-type people, that’s what’s important. And that kind of growing never stops. At least, it shouldn’t. You can grow, kid-boy, or you can die. That’s the choice you've got, and it goes on all of your life."

"I saw a bunch of the weirdest, oddest people I have ever met in my life, who thought different, and acted different, and even made love different. And they made me laugh, and get angry, and be happy, and be sad, and excited, and even fall in love a little....And they didn’t seem to be so weird or strange anymore."

"Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don’t you think?"

"“As time progresses,” Lump stated, “people learn. That’s the only hope.”"

"“The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.” “Is that true?” “I don’t know.”"

"Maybe that’s the most important thing there is, Lump. If there is an answer to that question, Lump, that’s what it is, to know you’re yourself and nobody else."

"You’re you, Jo. You’re you and everything that went into you, from the way you sit for hours and watch Di’k when you want to think, to the way you turn a tenth of a second faster in response to something blue than to something red. You’re all you ever thought, all you ever hoped, and all you ever hated, too. And all you've learned."

"Books! Real books were Joneny’s delight. Heavy, cumbersome, difficult to store, they were the bane of most scholars. Joneny found them entrancing. He didn’t care what was in them. Any book today was so old that each word glittered to him like the facet of a lost gem. The whole conception of a book was so at odds with this compressed, crowded, breakneck era that he was put into ecstasy by the simple heft of the paper. His own collection, some seventy volumes, was considered a pretentious luxury by everyone at the University."

"“In this random, chaotic world, filled with apes and demigods and all in between, where mass murder and assassination is the past time of the hour, where any structure you cling to may topple in a moment, where a City of a Thousand Suns may be destroyed by a machine commanded by the psychosis of an empire and beauty doubts itself as insanity gorged on death—and I am free”—again he drew in his breath—“what am I free to do? You tell me what I am free to do!”"

"You see, the poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damage."

"Our parents saw each of us marrying, settling down, but certainly not with one another."