Honey, we all got to go sometime, reason or no reason. Dying's as natural as living. The man who's too afraid to die is too afraid to live.

Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded.

The mind of man is a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells.

Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.

But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.

...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?