“… Bringing the very heavens close enough to touch.
It was Zsadist.
His eyes closed, his head back, his mouth wide open, he sang.
The scarred one, the souless one, had the voice of an angel.”

“The difference between a dreamer and a visionary is that a dreamer has his eyes closed and a visionary has his eyes open”

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

“Max opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “No.”
“Speak louder. You used a word I don’t understand.””

“He held her close enough to kiss, close enough to whisper the most important secrets in the world, and he spoke to her as he would have wanted some good angel to speak to his family, to his own shivering young soul, long ago and in a land far away.”

“Carter gestured for silence. But the silence had already fallen. Archie, walking toward the platform for a close view of the proceedings, sucked in his breath, as if he were sipping this sweetest of all events. But he exhaled in surprise and stopped in his tracks as he saw Obie walk on the platform carrying the black box in his hands. Obie smiled maliciously when he caught Archie standing there in surprise, his mouth wide open in astonishment. No one had ever surprised the great Archie that way, and Obie's moment of triumph was a thing of beauty.”

“He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.”

“The greatest sermons are the ones given with a closed mouth and an open heart.”

“And the last thought he had that morning as he closed his eyes was: I hope the tornado hit the moose.”

“If I had stopped to listen once or twice
If I had closed my mouth and opened my eyes
If I had cooled my head and warmed my heart
I'd not be on this road tonight.”