“More than the choking heat, more than the blinding flames that rise up into the night sky, more than the endlessly leaping colours that change shape with every moment, more than all of these is the transforming power of fire. Fire takes solid wooden beams and reduces them to charcoal. It licks at everything with a scarlet tongue and leaves it black. It spreads like the folds of a golden robe over human bodies and what is left is gray and chalky: ash, blown up and up by every breath of wind only to fall like dust on the ground. When it is burning most fiercely, it seems that it might go on forever and devour everything in its path. It does not cower and withdraw in front of princes. Palace and hovel alike are good fuel and nothing more. It is unstoppable. And when it has moved, what remains is desolation.”

“And dying is more natural than living, because what could be more unnatural than that panicstricken thing leaping and falling like a last flame beneath the ribs?”

“Imagination transforms one substance into another. It changes what is into what might be, what was into what might have been. Straw becomes gold, gold straw, and neither is more real nor, I submit, more precious than the other. Pebbles turn into luminous pearls and pearls into little gray rocks, both solid and beautiful, both essential. Human beings take shape from clay, angels' wings are spun out of water, fire gives rise to the long tongues of demons, love emerges out of thin air, and the basic elements reconstitute themselves again and again."-The Man In The Ceiling”

“Said the lion to the lioness - "when you are amber dust - No more a raging fire like the heat of the sun(no liking but all lust) - Remember still the flowering of the amber bloodand bone,the rippling of bright muscles likea sea,Remember the rose-prickles of bright pawsThough we shall mate no moreTill the fire of that sun and the moon - Cold bone are one"Said the skeleton lying upon thesands of time - "The great gold planet thatis the mourning heatof the sunIs greater than all gold, more powerfulThan the tawny body of a lion that fireconsumesLike all that grows or leaps...sois the heart.More powerful than all dust. OnceI was herculesOr Samson, strong as the pillars of theseas:But the flames of the heartConsumed me, andthe mindIs but a foolish wind.”

“What you call magic is nothing more than an act of the imagination fired by the senses, then given shape by the power of your aura.”

“Nothing moves fast in Texas except the windmillsAnd the hawk that rises up with a clatter of wings.(Nothing more startling there than sudden motion,Everything is so still.)”