“With abstraction, birds become numbers. Men and maniocs, too. We can look at a scene and say, ‘There are two men, three birds and four maniocs’ but also, ‘There are nine things’ (summing two and three and four). The Pirahã do not think this way. They ask, ‘What are these things?’ ‘Where are they?’, ‘What do they do?’ A bird flies, a man breathes and a manioc plant grows. It is meaningless to try to bring them together. Man is a small world. The world is a big manioc.”

“I withdrew a small card from the pouch. The front of it was filled with lines of elegant, hand-lettered script. "What does it say?" Dad asked, leaning forward. "The Four Remembers of Life," I read. "Number one: Remember, you are unique. Number two: Remember, there is purpose to your life. Number three: Remember you are free to choose what you are and what you become. And number four: Remember, you are not alone.”

“McMurphy tied a chunk of meat to each end of a four-foot string, tossed it into the air, and sent two squawking birds wheeling off, "Till death do them part.”

“In the same way many Christians--whole generations of them, sometimes entire denominations--have in their possession a book which will do a thousand things not only in and for them but through them in the world. And they use it to sustain only three or four things they already do.”

“If a shadow is a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world, then the three-dimensional world as we know it is the projection of the four-dimensional Universe. ”

“This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.”