"This coffee plunges into the stomach...the mind is aroused, and ideas pour forth like the battalions of the Grand Army on the field of battle.... Memories charge at full gallop...the light cavalry of comparisons deploys itself magnificently; the artillery of logic hurry in with their train of ammunition; flashes of wit pop up like sharp-shooters."

"Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough."

"I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world."

"The affections are like lightning; You cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen"

"In the South of California has gathered the larges and most miscellaneous assortment of Messiahs, Sorcerers, Saints and Seers known to the history of aberrations."

"LA needs the cleansing of a great disaster or founding of a barricaded commune."

"Los Angeles seems endlessly held between these extremes: of light and dark - of surface and depth. Of the promise, in brief, of a meaning always hovering on the edge of significance."

"Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."

"Nobel prize money is a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety."

"For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed."

"Through and through the world is infested with quantity. To talk sense is to talk quantities, It is no use saying the nation is large- how large? It is no use s aying that radium is scarce- how scarce? You can not evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves."

"No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently."

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines."

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

"If little else, the brain is an educational toy."

"Secret thoughts and open countenance will go safely over the whole world."

"The anatomical juxtaposition of 2 orbicularis oris muscles in a state of contraction."

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."