“McMurphy tied a chunk of meat to each end of a four-foot string, tossed it into the air, and sent two squawking birds wheeling off, "Till death do them part.”

“A few days back someone sent me two feathers. Two bird's feathers in a sheet of note-paper with a coronet, and fastened with a seal. Sent from a place a long way off; from one who need not have sent them back at all. That amused me too, those devilish green feathers.”

“Everything has two endings-a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.”

“With abstraction, birds become numbers. Men and maniocs, too. We can look at a scene and say, ‘There are two men, three birds and four maniocs’ but also, ‘There are nine things’ (summing two and three and four). The Pirahã do not think this way. They ask, ‘What are these things?’ ‘Where are they?’, ‘What do they do?’ A bird flies, a man breathes and a manioc plant grows. It is meaningless to try to bring them together. Man is a small world. The world is a big manioc.”

“Khufu carefully picked out everything that ended with-o—Doritos, Oreos, and some chunks of meat. Buffalo? Armadillo? I was scared to even ask.”

“We get paid to hang out in this beautiful court! Four puppets on a string, just like those two up there (pointing to the two hanging puppets), waiting for someone to jerk them into life and make them talk.”