Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape.

One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.

Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore.

What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?

Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realm which is that of the mind alone.

The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorous had forgot the savage brain.

You think that way as you begin to get grayer and you see pretty plainly that the game is not going to end as you planned.