“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments.”

“A man of broad principles. Of liberal sentiments. Even a generous man...Yet one might say that his way through the world was so broad it scarcely made a path at all”

“And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys.”

“If fate is the law, then is fate also subject to that law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility. It's in our nature. Sometimes I think we are all like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside of our own making.”

“Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.”

“The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again.”

“Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.”