His foot always got caught in that wide, loose stirrup: his mouth. - Michael Bishop

The True Word. Once every quarter, once every new-style month, I preach it.
"The True Word on what? Everybody's got his own true word, you know."
"On how not to die, woman. The basis of every religion."
"No," Zoe said. Not every one of them; just the ones that don't know exactly what to do with the here-and-now.

Extinction confers on the has-been the same mythological status that imagination confers on the never-was.

The vitality of children is clean and honest. Their petty shortcomings derive, in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, from their effete elders’ pettiness. Contagion is a generational fact. But children can develop defenses against their elders’ spiritual scurvy simply because they’re new.