“When experience flies into realms that language cannot touch, honesty demands beyond-language.”

“This man obviously contained some sort of catalytic converter that rendered the filth of his language as natural and inoffensive as dirt in a garden.”

“I think it might fly around and around in there like a witch on a broomstick flies round the sky, and go right on hurting invisible parts of the person you don’t even know you’re hurting, because you can’t see all the ways their insides are connected to the mean thing you did to their outside And from them on, maybe that hump of mean energy sits inside the hurt person like a coiled-up hose or a rattlesnake, just waiting in there. And someday, when that person touches somebody else, maybe even way in the future, that rattlesnake energy might come humping up out of them by accident and hurt that next person too, even though they didn’t mean to, and even though the person didn’t deserve it.”

“There were a couple of occasions in India when I was twenty that felt to me like going out with a thimble in your hand, hoping to catch a drop of rain, and having the ocean land on your head. These experiences convinced me that there is an absolute love that pervades everything.”

“Music is just a word for something we love largely because it consists of things that words can't express. Likewise, the heart is just a word for something in us that music sometimes touches. ”

“Hearing this, the woman skooched her legs around each other, jingled her bells, leaned toward Everett till their shoulders touched, and laughed and squirmed the sorts of laughs and squirms that Jehovah may have witnessed on the day He created misogyny. The Cosmos kept its balance, though, because Everett was meanwhile leering the sort of testicular leer that Kali may well have had in mind when She inspired Man to create asbestos, carcinogenic beer, and the trenches in World War I.”

“The mind will say this forever. But I mostly fish rivers these dayas. In so doing, movement becomes stasis, flux is the constant, and everything flows around, through, and beyond me, escaping ungrasped, unnamed, and unscathed. The river's clean escape does not prevent belief in its reality. On the contrary, there is nothing I love more than the feel of a wholeness sliding toward, around, and past me while I stand like an idiot savant in its midst, focusing on tiny, idiot-savantic bits of what is so beautiful to me, and so close, yet so wondrously ungraspable.”