“Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.”

“Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.”

“... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.”

“She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she had demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadn't killed three- quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome--the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded.”

“You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.”

“In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.”

“Caravaggio was constantly diverted by the human element during burglaries. Breaking into a house during Christmas, he would become annoyed if the Advent calendar had not been opened up to the date to which it should have been.”