“In the eyes of the others we who met them saw ourselves. And there were demons there.”

“The old world was destroyed because of its own greed and secretiveness. Those least evolved rose to the top, as happens here. Your leaders, as you call them, are all people with damaged senses of self-worth. The damaged goods run the civilization. That’s why it cannot last." "Abraham Lincoln was damaged goods?""The need to lead is a symptom.”

“This is a temple to lost knowledge, girl. This is where sense comes to die. This is where we learn to live when the world is empty.”

“How are you going to teach logic in a world where everybody talks about the sun setting, when it’s really the horizon rising?[Cal Craig]”

“What would white people become if they (we) actually confronted the fact that being white was not inherent in a person, in ourselves and others, but actually a demand that others make on us, a role we must play to fulfill a certain responsibility? Part of what is demanded is that we see others as different, yet attribute that difference to those others and not to ourselves, who are told to see it. Who would white people become if they saw their own eye as an active agent in the production of race though that eye's attribution to others? The so-called colorblindness that has become a prevalent notion these days would be impossible. Is the essence of race, for which color is a symbol (of the imposed categorization), exists in the eye itself and not in the object seen by the eye, which has its own qualities, to what could the eye be blinding itself? Who would we become if we saw those others not as different but as living under an imposition of difference? Who would we become if we saw that imposition as something in which we were not only implicated but active agents in producing? Who would we become if we sought to interpose ourselves in that process of imposition, to obstruct it in its primordial moment? Who would white people become if they saw themselves through the eyes of those on whom they impose themselves?”

“His contagious conviction that our love was unique and desperate infected me with an anxious sickness; soon we would learn to treat one another with the circumspect tenderness of comrades who are amputees, for we were surrounded by the most moving images of evanesecence, fireworks, morning glories, the old, children. But the most moving of these images were the intagible relfections of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail.”

“If we saw ourselves through the people's eyes we wouldn't be us anymore,we would change the flaws that make us perfect.”