Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.
— Russell Hoban
When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?
Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone.
Explorers have to be ready to die lost.
After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
But when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself.
Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn't in us. It's almost as if we're put here on earth to show how silly they aren't.
There are situations in life to which the only satisfactory response is a physically violent one. If you don't make that response, you continually relive the unresolved situation over and over in your life.
If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.
An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of; we blind them as quickly as possible.
