“The Eskimos may have a hundred words for snow, but at that moment, I only had two: Fuck. Yeah.”

“The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck.”

“I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.”

“She remembered reading somewhere that Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. Eleanor wished there were a hundred ways to say her name. She thought, maybe, if her name was howled from all corners of the world, in a million different voices, that she might explode into a cloud of snow. Light and separate, her parts floating down onto the world in a series of beautiful crystalline moments.”

“If eskimos can come up with fifty words for snow because its a matter of life and death, why do we have just one word for love?”

“I tried to think the same thought in as many different religions as possible, so the thought itself wouldn't be limited by any particular way of reasoning, the way words restrict -- the whole eskimo-seventeen-words-for-snow idea.”