“Everything of importance is already known, a sage said—the only thing is to rediscover it. Much of the current excitement about healing is a kind of collective remembering, a homecoming to the old wives and old doctors.”

“I always think that when something is currently very trendy, it's already very old.”

“Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.”

“Recalling all the erroneous things that doctors have been able to say about sex or madness does us a fat lot of good. I think that what is currently politically important is to determine the regime of verediction established at a given moment … on the basis of which you can now recognize, for example, that doctors in the nineteenth century said so many stupid things about sex. … It is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of verediction which has a political significance.”

“There are more old drunks than there are old doctors.”

“One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.”

“The most important thing to remember is that we must live in the present, and if in the present moment we are still holding on to old wounds and betrayals, it is in this moment that forgiveness is called for.”

“Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales—which said that Jahna’s people were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human—taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals.
But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such non-people as the Old Man’s kind.”

““You shouldn’t be so critical,” said Mike the bartender. “Some people like this kind of thing, you know.”
“The kind of person who gets excited over that, I don’t care about,” said Ernest.”

“Lord, I feel so small sometimes in this great big old world.
Yeah, I know there are more important things.
But don't forget to remember me.”