“I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, 'want' to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't 'want' to cut down on my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc. etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which 'progress' is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men.”

“Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling,' she used to say. 'Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?”

“I want to make a world more magical than my own. I don't care if it makes sense, I don't care if it's ridiculed or if, rather than a neat round planet that goes around forever, it ends with a cliff that falls off into nothing. I want to have my eyes wide open, and I want to see this room and at the same time, not this room.”

“I knew instantly that I wanted that type of love in my life. To have someone I could take care of in every sense and who would trust me to do so. No matter what I asked of them.”

“I know only, like, five Indians in our whole tribe who have never drunk alcohol. And my grandmother was one of them. "Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling," she used to say. "Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?" (158)”

“Dudes in suits and politicians didn't make sense to my 18-year-old brain. All I wanted to do was be awesome.”