“When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?”

“Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.”

“I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.”

“So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd”

“It was as if they had climbed the last hill in creation.”

“As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.”

“In such seconds of decision entire futures are made”

“Who are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the Will of the Gods?I am me, Thomas Hockenberry. I am fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods.”

“I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.”

“The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.”

“... a comment with the idle arrogance common of such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.”