“Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”

“It doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.”

“... 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.”