Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.

Truth is a matter of the imagination.

In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.

Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalised such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though they can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. “Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” we cry, feeling that we have understood something important — but we’ve merely recognised it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.

Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.

Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.