“But … even if I did – which I didn’t – how could I have found them myself, found them old and faded? If I only wrote them down myself – later? How can Sebastian have found them a hundred years ago – if I hadn’t even written them yet? And where did the information come from?”

“There are many wonders in this world that will remain quite beyond your reach unless, in fact, you reach for them.”

“There was no answer. I looked up.Epsilon’s light shone out onto a picture on the wall.A round picture in a square frame.The golden symbol of O. The One. The symbol of perfection.The symbol of eternity. The One without beginning or end.The One who is the beginning and the end.The One to whom time is meaningless. The One who could do whatever he wanted with time. What had Mrs. Shiling said, in the kitchen, a year ago?“Time is nothing. Not to him. A moment in time. What is that t him?”Quivering from head to toe, I stared up at that simple O.”

“In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.”

“The O was not a number – a zero. It was a letter – the first letter of the word One. But it was far more than that. It was a symbol in itself – the symbol of unity. The perfect circle. Of the complete unit. The never ending. The One.And the snake? The snake was not a perfect circle. It could never be unified – not even if it began to eat its own tail. The symbol of one who depends only upon itself for nourishment.”

“I found the poems in the fields,And only wrote them down.”

“. . . companions were to be valued, wherever one found them.”