“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutterhammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without asmuch as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and firstblow it will split in two, and I know it was not that lastblow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

“One day Bird had approached his father with this question; he was six years old: Father, where was I a hundred years before I was born? Where will I be a hundred years after I die? Father, what will happen to me when I die? Without a word, his young father had punched him in the mouth, broke two of his teeth and bloodied his face, and Bird forgot the fear of death.”

“Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

“Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might bedone in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds ofhours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt theprecious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.”

“I often wished that I could split myself a hundred ways and live a hundred separate lives [...]. But in the end, I supposed, we only had one life to lead, and the roads not taken would always outnumber and outshine the roads we end up taking, day by day, without plan.”

“Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry for years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it.”