Some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and the scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, the unexpected. Numerous observers have testified upon the loneliness of the process.

In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable.

It has been asserted that we are destined to know the dark beyond the stars before we comprehend the nature of our own journey.

A man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite normally. He will be wounded by what other men call trifles. It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of nineteenth century beer bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one's head like a hall clock.

God knows how many things a man misses by becoming smug and assuming that matters will take their own course.

I no longer cared about survival...I merely loved.

Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present.