“A man without a wife and babies is a menace to civilization... One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.”

“One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.”

“he could feel the earth beneath, all the deep stone of it, cool and hard near the surface of the earth, but hotter and softer as you went deep, until it flowed like honey, a vast sweet fiery ocean of molten rock a thousand times more voluminous and ten thousand times heavier than the sea. It felt to him as if it were his own blood, and his heart pumped it.”

“Isn’t that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?”

“It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.”

“The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.”

“It's called civilization. Women invented it, and every time you men blow it all to bits, we just invent it again.”