“His body and his mind went about their different businesses. The former, freed from conscious instruction, breathed, rolled, sweated, and digested. The latter went dreaming.”

“I dreamed I spoke in another's language,I dreamed I lived in another's skin,I dreamed I was my own beloved,I dreamed I was a tiger's kin.I dreamed that Eden lived inside me,And when I breathed a garden came,I dreamed I knew all of Creation,I dreamed I knew the Creator's name.I dreamed--and this dream was the finest--That all I dreamed was real and true,And we would live in joy forever,You in me, and me in you.”

“You are my beauty, my body, perfected. All I was drained off into you. When you left, my health went with you - leaving a moral morbidity I smell in my sleep. The acts I committed for the love of you. Acts I can never forget. I crawled into the bellies of the dead to fish out a little life... I have an appetite for it now. I have an unrelenting lust for death.”

“There was little comfort, this voice inside him said, in discovering a mystery at the wellspring of his life so banal his unremarkable mind could readily fathom it. Better, perhaps, to die in doubt, knowing there was some revelation still unfound, than to pursue and possess such a wretched certainty.”

“All had this in common: that if they returned from the Empty Quarter - even though their journey might have taken them only a day's ride into that place - they came back changed men. Nobody could set his eyes on such a void and return to hearth and home without having lost a part of himself to the wilderness forever. Many, having endured the void once, went back, and back again, as if daring the desert to claim them; not content until it did. And those unhappy few who died at home, died with their eyes not on the loving faces at their bedside, nor on the cherry tree in blossom outside the window, but on that waste that called them as only the Abyss can call, promising the soul the balm of nothingness.”

“Here is a list of terrible things,The jaws of sharks, a vultures wingsThe rabid bite of the dogs of war,The voice of one who went before,But most of all the mirror's gaze,Which counts us out our numbered days.”

“Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness. Even winter — the hardest season, the most implacable — dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.”