"At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work."

"Assist your Muslim brother, whether he be an oppressor or oppressed. 'Bu how shall we doit when he is an oppressor?' enquired a companion. Muhammad replied, 'Assisting an oppressor by forbidding and witholding him from oppression."

"The things she said seemed to have very little relation to the last thing she had said a minute before. She was the sort of person, Tommy thought, who might know a great deal more than she chose to reveal."

"The foolish man conceives the idea of 'self.' The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of 'self;' thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain."

"Misogyny has not been completely wiped out anywhere. Rather, it resides on a spectrum, and our best hope for eradicating it globally is for each of us to expose and to fight against local versions of it, in the understanding that by doing so we advance the global struggle."

"Thrift of time will repay you in afterlife with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams waste of it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual and moral stature beyond your darkest reckoning."

"And although the space they occupy isn’t like normalspace, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of atail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings andyour eyeballs eventually realize that the space between eachdragon is, in fact, another dragon."

"To dive in the darkness, I should dive in the truth, then in images of the world..., then facts, then in books, then listening, then in short stories... That's how I write the horror. It's very complicated."