“You sleep with a dream of summer weather,wake to the thrum of rain—roped down by rain.Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass and rainy air. The plastic table on the terracehas shed three legs on its way to the garden fence. The mountains have had the sense to disappear. It's the Celtic temperament—wind, then torrents, then remorse.Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,docks in a pool of shadow all its own.That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on.”

“When they made loveGeryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' backas it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way downfrom the base of the neckto the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.”

“This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds. ...your spirits don't rise until you get way down. Maybe it's because this - the mud, the bottom - is where it all rises from. ...when someone enters that valley with you, that mud, it somehow saves you again.”

“With THC in your system, you don't dream. And you need to. Otherwise it is like losing one of your senses. Dreams are part of your wholeness. ... when you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve. ... the dream world had rules in it. You couldn't read a clock in your dreams. It would not give you the time. If the lights were on in a room, you could not turn them off in a dream. ... in indigenous tribes all over the world, the dream world was like church. [p. 247]”

“It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

“Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.”

“All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with therecognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now.”