Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.

I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.

He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

The world began in hazard and will end in it.

No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.