“What a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean.”

“Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean.”

“They don't know how to watch things. They don't know how to see anything but what they expect to see.”

“Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say no when they mean yes, and drive a man out of his wits just for the fun of it.”

“You don't know old Charles as I know him. He's got into a queer set, and there's no knowing what mischief he's up to. He's perfectly capable of starting a revolution in Armenia or somewhere merely to see how it feels like to be a revolutionary. That's the damned thing about the artistic temperament.”

“I raised my arms as if in prayer and heard the mutter of response behind me. Then I scattered the dried grains, red and brown and black, and studied the patterns they formed on the stone ledge before Sibbos. This is not such a mystic thing. You see what it is sensible to see, or else you interpret what you see so that the meaning comes out as you want it.”

“What you don't understand you can make mean anything.”

“I don't know what you mean. I don't keep a record.”

“You know what? You didn't do anything wrong. I did. It's this dumb thing I do. I look into things and see more than I'm supposed to.”

“The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.”