“Drip of a drop,Don't name it a tear,It's hard to cry with tears,harder without,To smother a sob without a sound,to bite your forefinger in helplessness,and cry out Hey! Where's the pillI can take to cure this?What's the doctor's name?What operation can save me?”

“The cruelest prison of all is the prison of the mind.”

“Youth calls to age across the tired years: 'What have you found,' he cries, 'what have you sought?" 'What have you found,' age answers through his tears, 'What have you sought.”

“Cry freely and let your tears fall for a life without tears is like a life without heartache weaking and painless”

“What did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they could cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. Oskar has a vision of floodgates opening. Of dams bursting in the spring floods. What is the name of that river that overflows every spring and the government does nothing to stop it?”

“For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.”

“It's a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming in to it. Tears from the start”