“overhead the birds are calling,their cries seeming to feel the air. As i watch, they rise.. flinging their bodies against the sky, intent upon the moment, spinning and turning like embers of smoke upon the air. I envy them, this life of theirs..the way they live so free of themselves, they are without past, without future, an exaltation of life beating in so many parts, rising up into the infinity of space. watching them i find i want to weep, and yet i have no tears.”

“Sometimes when i am alone out there, or even here in my house, it seems almost possible that i might lose myself: there in that silence where there is no need of words or discourse. i have heard it said that there are men who have lost their minds to it, reason drained away into the dissolving space of sea and sky. And indeed while there are times when this place is full of life, a raucous cavalcade, even then there is a sense of emptiness, as if some ancient silence lingers in the fabric of this place, something alien, and unknowable.”

“For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever”

“For a second something deep and old rises inside me and I could fall on the ground and weep for joy, or open up my arms and spin. After being enclosed for so long, I want to drink in all the space, all the bright, empty air stretching around me on all sides.”

“From the window, I watch the city and the freeway. In the distance, the sky-rises look like mystic spires, unbearably close and far. I want to pick them up and eat them. I want to scream out loud sometimes, but I never do.”

“Everybody wants to fly. At some stage in their lives, everyone looks up in the sky and sees the seemingly effortlessness of a bird in the gulf of air overhead and thinks: I wish, just one time, that could be me.”

“I [am] obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, "I feel: therefore I exist." I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them "matter". I feel them changing place. This gives me "motion". Where there is an absence of matter, I call it "void", or "nothing", or "immaterial space". On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.”