"... the Coleman lantern is the symbol of the camping craze that is currently sweeping America, with its unholy white light burning in the forests of America."

"Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy's hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a cup of coffee."

"There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to The Spirit of St. Louis."

"Everybody wants to go to bed with everybody else, they're lined up for blocks, so I'll go to bed with you. They won't miss us."

"Thinking hard about you I got on the bus and paid 30 cents car fare and asked the driver for two transfers before discovering that I was alone."

"Forsaken, fucking in the cold, eating each other, lost runny noses, complaining all the time like so many people that we know"

"if a girl likes me a lot and starts getting real nervous and suddenly begins asking me funny questions and looks sad if I give the wrong answers and she says things like, "Do you think it's going to rain?" and I say, "It beats me," and she says, "Oh," and looks a little sad at the clear blue California sky, I think: Thank God, it's you, baby, this time Instead of me."

"I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace."

"A friend came over to the house a few days ago and read one of my poems. He came back today and asked to read the same poem over again. After he finished reading it, he said, "It makes me want to write poetry.""

"“I’m a terrible salesman,” he finally said. “I always tell the truth about what I’m selling, and then nobody buys it.”"

"“I see Alvin with a son. That what he want most.” “I see him with a woman,” said Rien. “That is what he miss the most.” “I see him kneeling by a child’s grave,” said Dead Mary. “That is what he fears the most.”"

"“Everybody thinks they want to see the truth,” said Tenkswa-Tawa. “That’s one of the lies we tell ourselves.”"

"Arthur had heard Peggy say that she didn't wish for more comfortable furniture, because if the chairs were softer, company would be inclined to stay longer."

"“I don’t plan to die for any cause,” said Jim Bowie. “Nor any man, excepting only myself. I know that ain’t noble, but it prolongs my days, which is philosophy enough for me.”"

"I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn't just survive, but deserves to."

"The environment that nutures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa."

"La Tia was fearless, but that could mean either that she had no guile or that she had no conscience."

"Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won."

"Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey."

"A rustic setting always suggests fantasy; to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets."

"That is the ultimate power, to stare death in the face and be unafraid."

"“He’s young,” she said. “We’ve all been guilty of that sin,” said Alvin. “And some never get over it.”"

"She sounded how you'd expect talking to a tree to sound - bored out of her mind."

"I'm accusing you of violating the laws of nature," he said, irritated at my failure to respond. "Nature's virtue is intact," I reassured him. "I just know some different laws."

"Gods are like that. It isn't enough for them to run everything. They want to be famous, too."

"In his sleep the voice of the land came to him like whispered lullabies. I did not choose you, said the land. I cannot speak except to those who hear me, and because it is in your nature to hear and listen, I spoke to you and lead you here to save me, save me, save me. Do you know the desert they will make of me? Encased in burning dust or layers of ice, either way I'll be dead. My whole purpose is to thrust life upward out of my soils, and feel the presence of living feet, and hear the songs of birds and the low music of the animals, growling, lowing, chittering, whatever voice they choose. That's what I ask of you, the dance of life, just once to make the man whose mother will teach him to be Quetzalcoatl and save me, save me, save me."

"They are beautiful monsters... And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty."

"I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration."

"If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?"

"I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work."

"The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered."

"He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them."

"Only a fool can't be fooled."

"She thinks she's kept me. She would have kept me better if she had let me go now."

"I will love you forever, he thought. I am lying, he thought, and this time he was right."

"He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more."

"I wanted your songs. You wanted my songs more than you wanted my happiness. So you took my happiness, and stole my songs."

"You are mine, but you are not mine. I am yours, but you hardly know it."

"[He] looked death in the eye and did not seem disappointed."

"There's always hope... even when there isn't faith. And sometimes, without hope or faith, there must be charity."

"Many a man isn't as good as his woman, but I never knew a husband who was better than his wife."

"To me, the truth is what actually happened. Yet it is impossible to know anything approaching the whole truth about past events. Even the people living them could not possibly understand. That truth is always out of reach."

"They never noticed that he was in fact what they only pretended to be."

"Justice could be cruel, and crueler yet necessity, but mercy was the cruelest thing of all."

"A dagger has only a single point, but a traitor cuts from anywhere."

"He knew her too well to see her from the distance that pity requires. He loved her because he admired her. For bearing without complaint the burden the queen put on her. For still being gentle and loving when she had ample reason to be bitter."

"Are you the strongest of all men, so strong that you can be merciful to me, a weak woman? Here is the undoing of your strength: I am not a weak woman. I am not a little queen. And your mercy will be your undoing."

"Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was a gross insult."

"When he loved his bride it was not a queen he loved, but rather the girl as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood."

"A dreamer, a good man, a kind man who cared less for his plan than for the people in it."