“Sam Spade is as gray as the economic skies over America and moves through the story as cool and slick as a Teflon cat.”

“Obedience is the gateway through which knowledge enters the mind of the child.”

“Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky before the sun came out..you cannnot touch the clouds,you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers are to have it after a hot day.You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love we would not be happy.”

“One of the greatest, most beautiful things on this planet is open defiance of hate-inspired social conventions through tolerance-inspired relationships of those considered opposition.”

“Southern California had no quarterly miracles, no opportunities for starting over. Not everybody cares to pay the cold, silver coinage of winter for a seasonal renascence, but for me it was a small price.”

“I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.”

“The sun had burned through and the day had gone from dull to dazzling, yet in the west blask-satin thunderheads continued to stack up. It was as if night has burst a blood-vessel in the sky over there.”