"Who is Alice?" asked mother.
"Alice is somebody that nobody can see," said Frances. "And that is why she does not have a birthday. So I am singing Happy Thursday to her." - Frances the badger"
— Russell Hoban (A Birthday for Frances)

"Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it like Ahab with the White Whale. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone. Even in martiarchal societies I doubt that there were ever female Beowulfs. Women lie with gods and demons but they don’t go looking for monsters to fight with. Ariadne gave Theseus a clew but the minotaur was his business."
— Russell Hoban (Turtle Diary)

"When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?"
— Russell Hoban

"An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of; we blind them as quickly as possible."
— Russell Hoban

"There were no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind — tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-colored moon shivered to the silence of a ghost-roar on the rising air."
— Russell Hoban (The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz)

""An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do."
— Russell Hoban (The Medusa Frequency)