“War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn’t it? In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don’t we, and we constantly invoke our God. It’s got to be about something bigger than dying, or we’d all turn deserter.”

“This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you--we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination.”

“We’d torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that”

“We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.”

“Everything is arranged," John Robertson told me.Thank God."I forgot to mention that we appear to have one small problem," he said.Okay..."Evidently it seems Winston Holder has already left this morning to the border and Gbarnga. He took a journalist in."A journalist? Who?"I don't know who. They thought it must be you."But it wasn't me. I'm me," I said, though from the first hour in this country I'd begun to doubt it.I have Lincoln Smythe's address. He'll put us right. Everything will be arranged promptly, and we'll work out your itinerary."I thought everything was arranged," I said.By the bare bulb hung above our straw beds I saw, far back in John Robertson's eyes, the eternal West African question: What is this guy going on about?Naturally," he said, "but we just have to work out your itinerary."Everything is arranged doesn't mean you should expect to get anywhere or accomplish anything. In fact, for sanity's sake, those two ideas have to be banished: the idea of getting somewhere and the idea of accomplishing something. Everything is arranged means that all is complete, the great plan of the universe is unfolding before our eyes. So eat, drink, sleep. Everything is arranged.”

“And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”

“We live in the post-trash, man. It'll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there's been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one.”