“Metaphor is the currency of knowledge. I have spent my life learning incredible amounts of disparate, disconnected, obscure, useless pieces of knowledge, and they have turned out to be, almost all of them, extremely useful.”

“They exit one by one, or sometimes two by two. You scatter pieces of them on the snow in the woods and then run away as fast as you can, and then you turn and run back towards them, once they're beyond your reach.”

“Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. "I wonder what he's thinking," Howard will say.)”

“I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own paricular store of emotions - say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives - into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophiticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her.”

“A book is like a person, and one's reaction to a person invariably has more to do with one's own personality and life experience than with the actual person herself.”

“Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.I have sent up my gladness on wings, to be lost in the blue of the sky.I have run and leaped with the rain, I have taken the wind to my breast.My cheek like a drowsy child to the face of the earth I have pressed.Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.I have kissed young love on the lips, I have heard his song to the end.I have struck my hand like a seal in the loyal hand of a friend.I have known the peace of heaven, the comfort of work done well.I have longed for death in the darkness and risen alive out of hell.Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.I give a share of my soul to the world where my course is run.I know that another shall finish the task I must leave undone.I know that no flower, nor flint was in vain on the path I trod.As one looks on a face through a window, through life I have looked on God.Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.”

“You go in through double swing doors. Inside the double doors there is a combination PBX and information desk at which sits one of those ageless women you see around municipal offices everywhere in the world. They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don't have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever quite being polite and intelligent and knowledgeable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.”