Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.

From Mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there's a place to be located on a map that's destiny. If only you can get there. If it isn't too late. If no one stops you.

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.

For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?