“I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the world.”

A fool will study for twenty or thirty years and learn how to do something, but a wise man will study for twenty or thirty minutes and become an expert. In this world, it isn’t ability that counts, but authority.

The supernatural can be very annoying until one finds the key that transforms it into science,” he observed mildly… “Come on, Ox, let’s go out and get killed.

Blessed are the idiots, for they are happiest people on earth.

Error can point the way to truth, while empty-headedness can only lead to more empty-headedness or to a career in politics.

Don’t be ashamed of reliving your childhood, Ox, because all of us must do it now and then to maintain our sanity.

Immortality is only for the gods,’ he whispered. ‘I wonder how they can stand it.’

The greatest act of faith we are capable of is that of loving another more than we love ourselves, and occasionally we can be quite good at it.

I have never been able to understand why perfectly sensible people waste time being wittily obscure instead of just saying what they want and going on about their business.

The emotional health of a village depended upon having a man whom everyone loved to hate, and Heaven had blessed us with two of them.

Fable has strong shoulders that carry far more truth than fact can.

Our senses are woefully limited. Our brains are but tiny candles flickering in an infinity of darkness. Our only wisdom is to admit that we cannot understand, and since we cannot understand we must do the best we can with faith. which is our only talent.

Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn’t love me – I felt the wash of her love every day.

It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we’d read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.

Pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.

A daughter needs a dad to be the standard against which she will judge all men.

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.

We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.