You will have the last word.' 'Your name will be that word.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

She wouldn't climb out of the bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn't cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

Then Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver.

No one can take what's inside your head once it's there.

She felt as buoyantly patriotic as her Chechen classmates who could trace their family trees back to the acorns

Her mother stared in quiet awe of this more artful rearrangement of her genetic code, and slipped into a contentedness that usually appeared only after the red wine had fallen below the bottle label.

Time became more important the closer to death one was, so an extra few hours to make peace with the world were worth more than years.

But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

Hope always comes after evil has done its work. We cannot keep living on hope, though. (Box of Pandora)

To be thrown upon one's own resources is to be cast into the very lap of fortune for our faculties then undergo a development and display an energy of which they were previously unsusceptible.

The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.

I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion.

Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one

You might be a redneck if your parakeet knows the phrase Open up, Police!

I have no ego. There is no way you can have a big ego and survive in this [show]business. You can't learn if you think no one else has anything to say that's of value.

Success by the laws of competition signifies a victory over others by obtaining the direction and profits of their work. This is the real source of all great riches.

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

I do believe that the original sources of all religions should be taught, because with that we will find our similarities, not just our differences.