“Eventually the man comes to see that he has a mind, and that his mind is like a fist, wrapped tightly around a single thought. He cannot open the fist to look at the thought, for fear that it will fly away, but he knows that it is very important and that he must hang on to it, no matter what the cost.”

“Until finally he sees-- as it lies all around him-- the truth: it is space that makes stars.”

“He was close enough so that I could see his face clearly, even with his helmet's cheek flaps tied tightly under his bearded chin. I looked into the eyes of Hector, prince of Troy. Brown eyes they were, the colour of rich farm soil, calm and deep. No anger, no battle lust. He was a cool and calculating warrior, a thinker among these hordes of wild, screaming brutes. He wore a small round shield buckled to his left arm instead of the massive body-length type most of the other nobles carried. In it was painted a flying heron, a strangely peaceful emblem in the midst of all this mayhem and gore.”

“Joe arrived late again, but cheerful as ever. He told us about dealing with the customer’s FACC. This stood for ‘Fear, Anxiety, Cynicism, and Confusion’.Joe talked us through page four of the bible, regarding the Dichotomy within ‘the Prospect’. This ‘dichotomy’ was between the pospect’s ‘conscience mind’ and his ‘subconscience mind’. The gifted salesman found a link between the two. I waited a little while and then asked if Joe didn’t mean the prospect’s ‘conscious mind and his subconscious mind’. I hoped I’d get a laugh, but nobody noticed, nor was Joe openly thankful to me for the correction.”

“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.”

“Without ever exactly putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is standard trajectory. Something new appears in the world—a baby, say, or a car or a house, or an individual shows some special talent—with luck and huge expenditures of soul and effort you might keep the project stoked for a while, but eventually, ultimately, it's going down. This is a truth so brutally self-evident that he can't fathom why it's not more widely perceived, hence his contempt for the usual public shock and outrage when a particular situation goes to hell.”

“He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds—that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.”