“The most perfect solitude must entail the absence of all beings, but it must also tremble with the light of life. For example, a perfect solitude may find itself haunted by lives born of the imagination, characters lying on shelves in rows of books, or accompanied by figures waiting in dreams. The perfect solitude pushes one to sense the pulse of solitude itself; for example, a perfect solitude may be marked with the beat of one’s heart.”

“In this summer heat, I must remember that the realest things are the closest and farthest away, like the warmth found in winter: the heat hidden in the folds of one's coat, a lost floating breath, a kiss across the distance of zero degrees.”

“Let us take our tongues and stick them out and waggle them in the wind. Let us walk, loving, let us walk and love, walking along, loving.”

“A word is a word is another word more beautiful because of the former and the next and the circle and sun they create.”

“The little queen’s mother and father had said that she would live on, for a long time, and that her tears would magnify the life around her forever more, but they had not explained how she should go about going on.”

“The wall sawyer did not ask the little queen what she did. This was because in the little queen’s kingdom, people only volunteered their doings if they wanted to, and they never asked others their doings. It was considered impolite. Asking what one did was like asking who they were, and that was too simple a question for a very complex answer.”

“The most perfect solitude must entail the absence of all beings, but it must also tremble with the light of life. For example, a perfect solitude may find itself haunted by lives born of the imagination, characters lying on shelves in rows of books, or accompanied by figures waiting in dreams. The perfect solitude pushes one to sense the pulse of solitude itself; for example, a perfect solitude may be marked with the beat of one’s heart.”

“Whenever she felt at home, there always seemed to be love floating about on the edges of things.”

“The little queen lived in a world where the sky swirled like the sea and nothing was itself for very long. Everything looked to be in brushstrokes.”

“Suffice to say, the dream writer had a way of phrasing things. She could depict the curve of a cucumber, the shape of a sunbeam, the endearing, velvety tilt of a peach, in just such a way that she earned her living selling dreams. One simply made a selection, read it in solitude, and let it percolate till sleep. People swore they fell directly into her renderings, and one even asked if the dream writer could write a dream of dreaming forever. The dream writer could not do this, but she hired dream apprentices to expand the reach of her dreams and she wrote dreams for herself in which she would sit at a desk, pen in hand, and write even more dreams. This nearly doubled her output.”

“Being in the country is like being in a dream—one doesn't quite know who one is. There is an anonymity to it all—that strange human creature that is me, one among all.”