On the mainland, a rain was falling. The famous Seattle rain. The thin, gray rain that toadstools love. The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag. The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin roof making a sound in protest. The shamanic rain that feeds the imagination. The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

Laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters.

What mattered to Abu was the music of the sentence. 'A shadow does not belong to the object that casts it.' To Abu, it was a little poem. And in general, it was the poetics, the music of things that tossed his confetti.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.

Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.