If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

you can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece

To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.

A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't this world would end at once.