Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.
In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones.
Paper isn’t important. It’s the words on them that are important.
Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.
We are silent, considering shortfalls. There’s not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it’s not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life.
Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.
At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.
I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you’re gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It’s yours. Seize your space.
We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.
The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.
His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.
The bell that measures time is ringing.
I didn’t much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.
The cat jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It’s his way of telling whether or not i’m dead. If i’m not, he wants to be scratched; if i am – he’ll think of something.
Now that I am dead, I know everything.
More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?
The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.
One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.