“O blessed Letters, that combine in oneAll ages past, and make one live with all:By you we doe conferre with who are gone,And the dead-living unto councell call:By you th' unborne shall have communionOf what we feele, and what doth us befall.”

“We shall live even in this state of living death, we shall love, we shall feel, we shall defy all who would judge and destroy us.”

“Blessed be the stone masons, for they shall lay bricks of gold on the streets of heaven for their wives to walk upon. Blessed are the sowers and harvesters, for they shall live again in the Garden of Eden. Blessed are the bartenders, for Jesus will serve them. Blessed are the prostitutes, for Jesus will embrace them. Woe unto the pastors who preach hate, for they shall live in eternal hate. Woe unto the pastors who become brutes, for their flocks shall be scattered. Woe unto the Inquisitors, for Jesus will inquire unto them.”

“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”

“Do not imagine that you will save yourself, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling.Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

“What you said was true. we don't live or love in a vacuum. There are people around us who care about us who would be hurt, maybe destroyed if we let ourselves feel what we might want to feel.”