“He had learned that sometimes, watching someone work or standing beside them, looking at stars or at bugs or at a sunset, was far more communicative than the eternal babble that sprung from his own wayward tongue.”

“He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.”

“I enjoy hating musicians far more than I enjoy appreciating them. As far as I'm concerned, when someone becomes a rock star, he quits being a person.”

“.....listening means learning to hear someone's inner world and deepest feelings with far greater attention in order that we don't let our own assumptions get in the way. The dying may speak in images far more akin to dreamland than the world of everyday reality. In order to understand them we have to make adjustments to comprehend a poetic form of expression that is sometimes elusive but actually far more expressive than the world of facts.”

“He owns them more completely than if he had seized their balls in his hands”

“He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.”