“With one hand he put
A penny in the urn of poverty,
And with the other took a shilling out.”

“When someone asks you, A penny for your thoughts, and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny?”

“If it's a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny.”

“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”

“Think about it- the King James Bible took religion out of the hands of the high priests and put it in to the hands of the people. An entire generation became literate just to be able to read the King James version of the Bible.”

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

“The upper and lower ends of a humerus are like the brim and base of an urn. The shaft of the bone is like the belly of the urn. Fragments, even minute ones, of the detailed parts of a bone are like the indicator sherds of a broken urn. Fragments, even large ones, of the shaft of a bone are like the body sherds of a broken urn. Analyzing bones, after all, is very much like analyzing pottery.”

“Slowly he lifted his hands in the darkness and held them in mid-air, the fingers spread weakly open. If he reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a battery giving life and fire to those hands, and if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through these stone walls and felt other hands connected with other hearts -- if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock?”

“A penny saved is of more value than a penny paid out (Der Sparpfennig ist reicher denn der Zinspfenning).”

“One seldom recognizes the devil when he is putting his hand on your shoulder.”