"Your youth is certainly finished and old age has definitely arrived if you feel that you are losing enthusiasm, excitement and energy towards your dreams and goals."

"You may give up your big dream and that is very hard! If necessary, give it up but then create a new one! Never live without big dreams because they will keep you alive in life!"

"Lilliet Berne, La Generale, newly returned to Paris after a year spent away, the Falcon soprano whose voice was so delicate it was rumored she endangered it even by speaking, her silences as famous as her performances."

"If you take guns away from legal gun owners, then the only people who would have guns would be the bad guys. Even a pacifist would get violent if someone were trying to kill him or her. You would fight for your life, whatever your beliefs."

"That anyone should need to write a book advising people to 'eat food' could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat."

"YOUR LIFE IS WHAT YOU CHOOSE IT TO BE FROM EVERY MOMENT ONWARDS, WITHIN THE LIMITS OF YOUR CONTROL. AT TIMES YOU WILL HAVE TO REGROUP AND ADAPT DUE TO ISSUES OUTSIDE OF YOUR CONTROL. BUT MANY OF LIFE’S OUTCOMES ARE DETERMINED BY ITS CHIEF MASTER: YOU!"

"I loved the different voices all singing one song, the various tones and qualities, the passing lifts of feeling, rising up and going out forever. Old Man Profet, who was a different man on Sunday, used to draw out the notes at the ends of verses so he could listen to himself, and in fact it sounded pretty."

"I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story about being alive, and being a man; a story that, simple as it was, couldn't itself be told."