The wise are free from perplexities; the virtuous from anxiety; and the bold from fear.

He said : Not to know the decree is to be without the means of being a proper man. 2. Not to know the rites is to be without means to construct. 3. Not to know words is to be without the fluid needful to understand men.

Life is simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

You fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation.

Probably I dont believe in a lot of things that I used to believe in but that doesnt mean I dont believe in anything.

The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

I ain't got an original thought in my head. If it ain't got the scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in it

He tried to read her heart in her handclasp but he knew nothing.

Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.

Where all is known, no narrative is possible.

He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realized that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.