Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

War is what happens when language fails.

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.

Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.

People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.