“A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.”

There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing when we save our children, we save ourselves

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

If man has not found ways to deal with environmental problems such as water and air pollution by 1998, it will be too late. The future is not determined and it lies in our own hands.

My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.

Sooner or later I’m going to die, but I’m not going to retire.

Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.

in all cultures, human beings – in order to be human – must understand the nonhuman.

Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.

The negative cautions of science are never popular.

We need every human gift and cannot afford to neglect any gift because of artificial barriers of sex or race or class or national origin.

It is easier to change a man’s religion than to change his diet.

It used to be when we said, ”til death do us part,’ death parted us pretty soon. That’s why marriages used to last forever. Everybody was dead.

Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.

The ability to learn is older as it is also more widespread than is the ability to teach.

Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes. If he succeeds he will continue to grow in spite of all indignities.

At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.

Nora: i have questions. Patch: i should have known you’ve only been keeping me around for answers. Nora: well, that and your kisses. Anyone ever tell you you’re an incredible kisser?

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

I can’t answer either question. But the look she gives me reminds me of the look in the attack dog’s eyes in the aptitude test – a vicious, predatory stare. She wants to rip me to pieces. I can’t lie down in submission now. I have become an attack dog too.

Don’t make me regret this” i said, breathless. ” you haven’t regretted me once”. He kissed me, and i answered so hungrily i thought my lips would bruise. Patch&nora ( p. 180)

Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.

What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.