“At the roadsides I never had a really good dinner or a really bad breakfast.”

“I wonder how many people I have looked at all my life and never really seen.”

“Henri the painter was not French and his name was not Henri. Also he was not really a painter. Henri has so steeped himself in stories of the Left Bank in Paris that he lived there although he had never been there.”

“Intention, good or bad, is not enough.”

“When Kino had finished, Juana came back to the fire and ate her breakfast. They had spoken once, but there is not need for speech if it is only a habit anyway. Kino sighed with satisfaction - and that was conversation.”

“Dessie's friends were good and loyal but they were human, and humans love to feel good and they hate to feel bad.”

“Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans”