“The easiest thing to do with something that was bothering you was always to make fun of it.”

“I was thinking: Is this what love is, feeling like you've been spun around underwater? Forgetting how cold you are, until she looks up and you look down and you're embarrassed and the world comes rushing back in? Or is love not being able to get that image out of your head, the image of the moment right before she looked up?”

“The only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is not possible beyond a certain point: the most faithfully descriptive account of anything will always turn away from what it describes into its own self-contained grammatical fictions of subject and predicate and object.”

“Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.”

“We do not live in centred space anymore, but have to create our own centres.”

“The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing. [p.211]”

“It doesn't matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal shape is concerned, it will be equally mythical in either case. But we notice that any emphasis on shape or structure or pattern or form always throws a verbal narrative in the direction we call mythical rather than historical.(p.21)”