“Only a female could be as calculating and have the foresight that destiny requires,' the gypsy explained. 'Now fate is a man,' he went on, 'no planning, just go with the flow and see what tomorrow brings.”

“Kali comes from the Sanskrit word ‘kal’, meaning time. She is a Hindu goddess, who is greatly misunderstood by the Western world as being associated with sex, death and violence, but in the Hindu text she kills only demons. For humankind, she represents the death of the ego and the will to overcome the ‘I am the body’ idea. She reminds us that the body is only temporary, and through this realisation she provides liberation to her children. To the soul who aspires to greater spiritual endeavours, Kali is receptive, supportive and loving. It is only a person filled with ego who will perceive Kali in a fearsome form. Her black skin represents the womb of the quantum darkness, the great non-manifest from which all of creation arises and into which all of creation will eventually dissolve.”

“Each day at my job felt like one day closer to death; go to work, come home, watch TV, one whole day lost and gone forever. When I traveled, no time felt wasted. I was alert and active. I was switched on. I felt like I’d been living in a cage and I’d only just learned there was no lock on the door. I could just walk outside and do as I pleased. I didn’t want to get back in.”

“When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart.”

“My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected he was whittling at my skull — no, my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels.”

“Whatever he learned from me, I learned well from Leonardo that teaching is a matter of drawing out from men what is already in their hearts, and that men learn only what they want to.”

“...why can't I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn't stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this.”