“Your petal from the salty rose”

“Sissy dear. Your thumbs. HOLLYWOOD SPECTACULAR. LAS VEGAS. THE ROSE BOWL. Larger than any one man's desire.”

“My heart is a Latin American food stall and your love is a health inspector from Zurich.”

“If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'.”

“If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.”

“Courage is where you find it. Bravery that comes from a bottle-- or from book or from a sermon-- lacks the full strength and purity of bravery that comes straight from the heart.”

“If little else, the brain is an educational toy.The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.”