“I wanted a good place to settle:Cold Mountain would be safe.Light wind in a hidden pine -Listen close - the sound gets better.Under it a gray haired manMumbles along reading Huang and Lao.For ten years I havn't gone back homeI've even forgotten the way by which I came.”

“I turn off the radio, listen to the quiet. Which has its own, rich sound. Which I knew, but had forgotten. And it is good to remember.”

“The poet dreams of the mountainSometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.I want to climb some old gray mountains, slowly, takingThe rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleepingUnder the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.I want to see how many stars are still in the skyThat we have smothered for years now, a century at least.I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,And peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.”

“I want to be with one person forever. I don't want to date my way through guys until I've forgotten just what I was looking for in the first place and end up settling for the next one that comes along.”

“(in which, along with Montaigne, we raise the question of whether a book you have read and completely forgotten, and which you have even forgotten you have read, is still a book you have read)”

“What passes relentlessly through the years is blood, and time; all the bitterness or warmth along the way is almost incidental. Even blood gets forgotten eventually, bleached into myth which are bleached of all colour into ashes of myth.”