“My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.”

“Consider the horse'They considered it.”

“Oh you the creator, you the destroyer, you who sustain and make an end,Who in sunlight dance among the birds and the children at their play,Who at midnight dance among corpses in the burning grounds,You Shiva, you dark and terrible Bhairava,You Suchness and Illusion, the Void and All Things,You are the lord of life, and therefore I have brought you flowers;You are the lord of death, and therefore I have brought you my heart—This heart that is now your burning ground.Ignorance there and self shall be consumed with fire.That you may dance, Bhairava, among the ashes.That you may dance, Lord Shiva, in a place of flowers,And I dance with you.”

“What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.”

“Walking and talking - that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon.”

“Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say 'no' to the boss. But a man cannot say 'no' to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favour has been withdrawn.”

“...‘I am interested in everything,’ interrupted Gumbril Junior.‘Which comes to the same thing,’ said his father parenthetically, ‘as being interested in nothing.”