“My head was a desolate place and as barren as the bare hills of Le Marche. Until I began to build in it, only vultures nested there.”

“... Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are only termite hills left but no bush?”

“Just because birds fly over your head, doesn`t mean you have to give them a place to build a nest.”

“At times, feeling the wind on my brow, I went numb with horror. In my imagination I saw armies of ants and cockroaches calling to one another and scurrying toward my head, to some place under the top of my skull, where they would build new nests. There they would proliferate and eat out my thoughts, one after another, until I would become as empty as the shell of a pumpkin from which all the fruit has been scraped out.”

“his eyes took in the barren slopes and the scattered boulders and the lonley gray road windingits way into the fading hills,and i could feel him thinking to himself this is no place to die”

“The disorder in Yashar's apartment was that comfortable littering and stacking that only another writer can recognize as order - the considered scatter of papers and books a writer builds around himself until it acquires the cozy solidity of a nest.”