“Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice”

“What more could one ask of a companion? To be forever new and yet forever steady. To be strange and familiar all at once, with enough change to quicken my mind, enough steadiness to give sanctuary to my heart. The books on my shelf never asked to come together, and they would not trust or want to listen to one another; but each is a piece of a stained-glass whole without which I couldn’t make sense to myself, or to the world outside.”

“... epiphanies rarely repeat themselves.”

“You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, "We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is...frozen.”

“Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.”

“Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.”

“So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.”