“Show me the science. Last I heard, gay six-year-olds remain unproven.”

“Had a gay bull I had to sell last year. That was a damn nuisance. Gay son? That don't cost me nothing.”

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these last twenty years at least.”

“And when they finally demanded that I had to stop keeping score and that I needed to play every future contest as an exhibition, I casually made the kind of statement sixteen-year-olds should not make to forty-six-year-old Midwestern housewives: “Why are you telling me how to do my job?” I asked. “It’s not like I show up in your kitchen and tell you when to bake cookies.”

“The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden.”

“I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me.”