“It was the dream itself enchanted me:Character isolated by a deedTo engross the present and dominate memory.Players and painted stage took all my love,And not those things that they were emblems of.[from "The Circus Animals' Desertion"]”

“Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is saidIt was the dream itself enchanted me("The Circus Animal's Desertion")”

“The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.”

“Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.”

“The basis of all reasoning is the mind's awareness of itself. What we think, the external objects we perceive, are all like actors that come on and off stage. But our consciousness, the stage itself, is always present to us.”

“The Ohlones seem to have lived at a time and in a spiritual place before the imagination was cast away and isolated from “mainstream” consciousness. Since dreams were real, when an animal-god appeared in the hollows of the dream mind, it was not mere illusion: it was divine revelation.”