“There is a saying, if any stranger enquire of the first met of Maan, were it even a child, “Who is here the sheykh?” he would answer him “I am he.”

“A new voice haild me of an old friend when, first returned from the Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus which is called Straight; and suddenly taking me wondering by the hand, 'Tell me (said he), since thou art here again in the peace and assurance of Ullah, and whilst we walk, as in the former years, toward the new blossoming orchards, full of the sweet spring as the garden of God, what moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?”

“Love built on pain-the kind that lasts: whatever you love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever.”

“Science has proof without any certainty.Creationists have certainty without any proof.”

“It's tragic that extremists co-opt the notion of God, and that hipsters and artists reject spirituality out of hand. I don't have a fixed idea of God. But I feel that it's us - the messed-up, the half-crazy, the burning, the questing - that need God, a lot more than the goody-two-shoes do.”

“He drank even as he rode, which looked difficult. I cannot say it slowed him down any, but it did make him silly. Why do people wish to be silly?”

“This kiss is zeroes and ones jumbledand tossed into a pneumatic system,unscrambled at the end and scrawledonto a tape recorder slowly rollingat the side of your bed,then slapping back, reverbedoff the ringer, a tinny phantomof the smooch like a smack onan aluminum can, up the same veins through the belly of the same satelliteand softly to the side of my head;”