“Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life—one scratched on the wall.”

“In an isolated region from Iran there is this wall tower, windowless, doorless, not very tall. In its only room with arched walls and the stamped earth as its floor, there’s a wooden table and a bench. In this round cell a man that looks like me is writing in signs that i don’t understand a long poem about a man who in another round cell is writing a poem about a man in another round cell. Endless series; nobody will ever read what prisoners write. ”

“Rowan knew it was now possible to look directly at Zandra, Zandra the Princess of Jupiter, the one he had loved all his life. He reached out to take her hand. True, he was covered all over with scars and scratches and stitches, but then, in a way, so was she. The end.”

“What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe.”

“Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy”

“Birdy never felt artistic inclination when armed with a marking implement. What came to her were words, always words, commentary and criticism and correction and simple vocabulary curios; she scratched a few of them on the smooth red wall.”