“I look through the window at the huge valley lit up with different colors. The town is cradled by the dark mountains. From afar it looks as if nothing can get in or out, but judging by the stillness of the view it's as if the citizens have made peace with it and have settled without worry into their insular but protected haven each evening. There are people in the world, I imagine, who are born and die in the same town, maybe even in the same house, or bed. Creatures without migration: have they not lived a life because they have not moved? What of the migratory los González, moving from one place to another and marking every stopping place with angst? What kind of alternative is that? For once my father and I are thinking thinking the same way, sharing a similar yearning for our starting points to have been different, for our final destination to be anything other than the tearful, resentful arrival it is likely to be.”

“What's a kiss? The sound loneliness makes when it dies.”

“Unlike my dead lover, I refuse to/ choose the day I shock the world. There's no/ mystery left in suicide. The challenge is, my love,/ to keep yourself awake/ despite the sleeping pill doses of sickness and/ despair.”

“The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own human eyes. I know that is wasn't created especially for my use, and I share the guilt for what members of my species, especially the migratory ones, have done to it. But I am the only instrument that I have access to by which I can enjoy the world and try to understand it. So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, have lived in it, known it, died in it--have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.”

“In life, we are all on the same journey, we are all struggling to get from point A to point B. Different people have different point A originations and B destinations, but the path we travel is the same. If you can take what you have learned; share the experience and shortcuts you've discovered along the way, offer time saving tips and how you finally made it - then you can lighten the load of those who are just beginning on a similar path. Getting paid for it is an added bonus. My hope is that you do not end your journey at “I wrote a book” but rather understand that your book is just the beginning. Imagine the products you can create based on the contents of your book. Imagine the opportunities to share your knowledge with more people by speaking, training, coaching. You have an important message to share and the world is waiting...”

“When you're young you have such expectations of each other. So many needs. And when you're older..." He shrugs. "You want someone who understands. We've lived different lives. We've loved different people. But I think that there will always be that..." He struggles for the right word. "That understanding we share. Of having grown up in the same world, of having live through the same memories.”

“And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle--all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe--for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”