“A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.”

“What stays with me most is a general sense of loss, unease, and longing for the past that cannot be relieved.”

“My anthropological back gets raised hackles with simple worlds and simple conflicts. Nothing's simple. Nothing ever was.”

“The longness and shortness of the present moment can be recognized by utilizing a big image of the moon, which is reflecting on the surface of the ocean, and a small image of the moon on the surface of a cup of water, or in another example the very wide scale of the whole sky itself, and the very narrow space of the moon, which is shining in the sky.”

“Scrape the surface of language, and you will behold interstellar space and the skin that encloses it.”

“Desolation would not be the proper word to describe his feelings now; it was more the sense of emptiness he imagined he might feel standing all alone on the surface of the moon.”