Wine talks; ask anyone. The oracle at the street corner; the uninvited guest at the wedding feast; the holy fool. It ventriloquizes. It has a million voices. It unleashes the tongue, teasing out secrets you never meant to tell, secrets you never even knew. It shouts, rants, whispers. It speaks of great plans, tragic loves, and terrible betrayals. It screams with laughter. It chuckles softly to itself. It weeps in front of its own reflection. It revives summers long past and memories best forgotten. Every bottle a whiff of other times, other places, everyone...a humble miracle

I think if you are an outsider then you are an outsider always.

If you want something you can have it, but you have to do some work. It's the ethic my mother brought me up with.

To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think...This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact.

Drunkeness, she told us in a rare moment of confidence, is a sin against the fruit, the tree, the wine itself. Wine, distilled and nurtured from bud into fruit; it deserves reverance. Joy. Gentleness. (Page 194.)

I speak as I must and cannot be silent.

Library-denigrators, pay heed:suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.