There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it.

The first word gives origin to the second, the first and second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and so on. You cannot begin with the second word.

For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.

I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.

Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold.

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, and dwell upon it.