“We celebrate, we create, as citizens of Shatter. We hold a bond of unending happiness. This planet, at the edge of the galaxy, is our testament to life.Our dragons, in the sky, came from the stars. They brought many new things to explore.From the Blessings of the Father Dragon, a poem”

“He couldn't take his eye off that dragonThere was something odd about the swaying of his tail...he watched his curved and voluptuous reptilian legs move with grace......its stare was docile and...loving...He wanted that creatureHe wanted him all to himselfHe slapped his forehead, "Get ahold of yourself, George. It's a dragon!"He couldn't hold himselfHe followed the dragon-shifter into its caveFrom Lonely George and the Dragon God, a standalone story deriving from the universe built in Dragons and Cicadas.”

“When he removed his robes, you could see the hundreds of scars and bruises that shamelessly decorated his body. Huge black bruises, long scars that came from sword lacerations and whips and new wounds that bled fresh red blood.The Dragonboy's father had no idea his son suffered. That's because the boy never told.From The Binding, a story from the upcoming tenth update of Dragons and Cicadas”

“To all those whom seek the iron words of the community: if your book is good, it will stand on its own. Be it a short story, a novel, a novella, a chapter book, a poetry book, a chapbook, a manga or a graphic novel...it will seek reviews by itself. You need to do nothing with it. Do nothing but write. Give up review seeking and focus on writing, for that is what becomes you in the end.”

“New knowledge enhances an ever increasing sense of our own ignorance. The more we know, the more we know we don't know. Feynman called it 'the expanding frontier of ignorance'.”

“After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.”

“If we- and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others- do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world”