“He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.”

“He had a nice smile. Seeing it, I felt like I’d won a prize, because he was so sparing with them.”

“It was ridiculous—he was soaking. I had to get a towel and offer him clothes that he wouldn’t take. I knew immediately that I’d like him; he just had one of those faces. I could see what he’d been like as a boy, probably always fenced off in the electronic penitentiary of a too-fast mind.”

“He had never felt entirely comfortable around Raphael. Raphael seemed to him like Loki or some other trickster God, sometimes working for good and sometimes for evil, but always in his own interests.”

“In reality, no one had meant anything by talking to the parish pauper, none of them cared at all, no one even thought of carrying him downstairs to let him see the wedding like other folk; he was not allowed to see the wedding that he himself had brought about with his poetic talent—such is the lot of poets.</b”

“He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.”

“Life likes to be taken by the lapel and told, "I'm with you kid. Let's go!”

“He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.”

“An individual gets away from this type of self-centeredness when he pauses enough to see that no matter what he does in life, he does that because somebody helped him to do it. And he then gains the type of perspective and the type of balance which keeps him from becoming self-centered. He comes to see that somebody stands in the background, often doing a little job in a big way, making it possible for him to do what he’s doing.”

“I hold peace and war in my toga but I'l take a cherry flip
Today nobody knows whether he was tomorrow
They beat time with a coffin lid
If somebody had the nerve to rip the tail feathers
out of the trolley car it's a great age…”