"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

"A gentle Quaker hearing a strange noise in his house one night got up and discovered a burglar busily at work. He went and got his gun came back and stood quietly in the doorway. 'Friend ' he said 'I would do thee no harm for the world but thou standest where I am about to shoot.'."

"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."

"What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the Serpents offer and had said to him instead, 'Let me not be like God. Let me be what I was made to be -- let me be a woman?"

"The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past."