“There is for a man two things in life that are very important, head and shoulders above everything else. Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both.”

“It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.”

“No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?No. It's never like what you expected.Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?”

“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.”

“Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.”

“They's lots of work in this world that aint never paid for. But the accounts gets balanced anyway. In the long run. A man that contracts for work and then dont pay for it, the world will reckon with him fore it's out. With the worker too. You live long enough and you'll see it. They's a ledger kept that the pages dont never get old nor crumbly nor the ink dont never fade. If it dont balance then they aint no right in this world and if they aint then where did I hear of it at? Where did you? Only way it wont is you start retribution on you own. You start retribution on you own you'll be on you own. That man up there ain goin to help you. Aint no use even to ask.”

“The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.”