Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.

Sadness is very close to hate.

Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.