Quotes from book

Jitterbug Perfume

“When we accept small wonders, we qualify ourselves to imagine great wonders.”

“To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.”

“Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots.”

“salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.”

“Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops?”

“Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.”

“The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.”

“Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.”

“Most snoring is composed by Beethoven or Wagner, although a few times Wiggs had heard heavy metal rock performed on the somnambulate bassoon.”

“… overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between a German opera and a hockey game.”

“The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet he seems to connect the populace to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest.”

“There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition.”

“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.”

“They were old enough to know better. Some of them were old enough to remember when old Macdonald had a farm.”

“I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.”

“It is so amusing the way that mortals misunderstand the shape, or shapes, of time. … In the realms of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. … Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.”

“In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow.”

“It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes.”

“My lunar sign is in Virgo. Every month when the moon is full, I'm driven to balance my checkbook and straighten up my apartment. I can't help myself. Instead of a werewolf I turn into an accountant.”