“What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.”

“What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.”

“I center down - I retreat, not inside myself, but outside myself. ... Self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we don't waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.”

“I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains”

“Why, why in the blue-green world write this sort of thing? Funny written culture, I guess; we pass things on.”

“Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.”

“I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.”