If you think about something for long enough,' she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen.' She tapped her head. `It's all in the mind.

the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?

In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one.

Explore me' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.

Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.