Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.

When plant varieties are lost, their genetic material is lost — and lost forever.

The tribalization that began in the America of the 1960’s has, like the music and vague talk of revolution that we associate with that era, become a commodity.

Why does someone call himself a psychic and begin charging for his services? The motivation is surely as complex as in seeking a psychic’s help. Perhaps it will one day seem no more unusual to go for a reading than for a physical exam at a doctor’s office; but as there are good and bad doctors, there are psychics of every description.

When my perceptions truly coincide with what’s happening, it’s because I’m willing to lose myself in the other person or experience. It’s feelings of specialness I have about myself that keep me from doing that.

Enjoying lives of extraordinary creature comfort, the vast majority of whites do not complain when the law is directed against those who advocate changing the system.

Because each perception is unique, and different from every other perception, it is completely independent: each perception contains the whole of Reality at that instant. Anything that has happened before, anything that may happen — these are not real. Only that which is, is.

My esthetic: the electric bass is the full equal of any other instrument. Properly played, it can simultaneously provide both a solid rhythmic punch and a complex countermelody.

Roxboro’s a sensible town. Has been since the 1790’s, when its founders set it smack in the middle of Person County. They wanted their county seat to be easy to get to.

The novel opens — “Come into my cell. Make yourself at home. Take the chair. I’ll sit on the cot.” — and from that time on the listener might frown, grow sad, ask a simple question, but mostly he remains, of his own volition, silent. There is something in what the narrator is saying, or in the nature of their relationship, that compels his listener not to speak.