“A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and spoils'--of importance only within four walls. A tame animal--in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose.”

“No spirited mind remains within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its power of achievement.”

“Our souls are made of water, Goethe says. So too, our bodies. There is a flow within us, rising and falling, unidirectional, to the heart. there is a flow without also. We circulate. We are drawn up, and we fall back down to earth again. It's all haemodynamics.”

“The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.”

“Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.”

“The earth. Silently spinning, falling, breaking, reforming each and every millionth of a second. The earth, whose conspiracy it is to give everything it has, to offer up itself and only itself, and all of itself. Then to take back, one at a time, all it has given, every richness, every fragment, every follicle, folding it deep into the furnace of its heart, in a cold and perfect contract.”