Avicenna California...Museum of my twisted youth, vault of my dearest and most disgusting memories.

Sparrows and cats will live in my shoe, Sooner than I will live with you. Fish will come walking out of the sea, Sooner than you will come back to me.

All lives are composed of two basic elements," the squirrel said, "purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rain—this is nothing beside a life without poetry.

...no cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them.

I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, but not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else — what do they look to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?

Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air.

Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger, And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.