“Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.”

“He hoped these students would learn how to be at home in the desert, not how to conquer it; and he hoped that, in the process, they might discover the spiritual value of quietude.”

“The next day, William Lanney's much abused remains were carried in a coffin to the cemetery. The crowd of mourners was large. It included many of Lanney's shipmates, suggesting that the whaling profession in late-nineteenth-century Hobart was graced with a higher level of humanistic sensibility than the surgical profession.”

“Als de hemel donker wordt met zwarte donderwolken, de grote bomen zwaaien in de wind, de pauwen zingen, hunker ik ernaar terug te rennen naar Gir.”

“Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.”

“The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.”

“People come into our lives and then they go out again. The entropy law, as applied to human relations. Sometimes in their passing, though, they register an unimagined and far-reaching influence, as I suspect Hughes Rudd did upon me. There is no scientific way to discern such effects, but memory believes before knowing remembers. And the past lives coiled within the present, beyond sight, beyond revocation, lifting us up or weighting us down, sealed away--almost completely--behind walls of pearl.”