“Hoshino found Oshima an appealing young man. Intelligent, well groomed, obviously from a good family. And quite kind. He's got to be gay, right? Not that Hoshino cared. To each his own, was his thinking. Some men talk with stones, and some men sleep with other men.”

“Well, it is a good thing he died young. Most men don’t have the good sense to knowwhen to quit this earth. At least your husband didn’t drag on and on like some do.”

“Some men want to win a gold medal, some want a family, some want to be rich, some want to be free, some want to kill other men, and some men want to do the right thing. Me, I only want you.”

“It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they've got the time-span all wrong. From stone's point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backward and forward in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well.”

“There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.”

“Wife indeed!" laughed Monkey. "You haven't got a wife now. There are some sorts of Taoists that are family men; but who ever heard of a Buddhist priest calmly talking about his 'wife'?”