I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.

I felt the sensation of each of the directions I mentally and emotionally turned into amazed at all the possible directions you can take with different motives that come in like it can make you a different person — I’ve often thought of this since childhood of suppose instead of going up Columbus as I usually did I’d turn into Filbert would something happen that at the time is insignificant enough but would be like enough to influence my whole life in the end? — What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?

Something good will come out of all things yet — And it will be golden and eternal just like that.

Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?

I was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.

Pain or love or danger makes you real again.

...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.