When you feel strain, keep your mouth shut if you can.

You will not persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.

The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.

When Will Graham could open his right eye, he saw the clock and knew where he was- an intensive-care unit. He knew to watch the clock. Its movement assured him that this was passing, would pass. That's what it was there for.

What do you look at while you’re making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do no raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor of an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense.

You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.

I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.