The Flea

''Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man -let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall- or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.''

Home is where I lay my dreams.

The element of obscurity, related to nature's self-concealment, is necessary to the soul's capacity for growth, for it vexes the latter toward self-dependence.

Experience is mind-centered and free of reference to actualities of space and time.

If value resides everywhere, it resides nowhere, as it ceases to be a basis for making distinctions and decisions.

Wilderness is above all an opportunity to heighten one's awareness, to locate the self against the nonself. It is a springboard for introspection. And the greatest words, those which illuminate life as it is centrally lived and felt, intensify that process.

All forms of life modify their contexts.