Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.

To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.

The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.