“So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.”

“But let me have silence always, in the centre of the shouting—that is essential! Let me have silence so that no pin may drop and not be heard, and not a whisper escape us for all our spouting, nor the needle's scratching upon this gramophone of a circular cosmic spot. Hear me! Mark me! Learn me! Throw the mind's ear open—shut up the mind's eye—all will be music!”

“It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.”

“So you find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration; it leaves you again in the desert.”

“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams...”

“I want to escape with you, Jack.""I'll always be your escape, Lex.”