She entered his dreams sane and left mad. She began with words of love and ended with sounds that frightened him.

If your trains on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.

Ah, Dubin, you meet a pretty girl on the road and are braced to hop on a horse in pursuit of youth.

Without heroes we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go.

You see in others who you are.

A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all a loneliness and men know it best.

Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

Thoreau gave an otherwise hidden passion and drew from woods and water the love affair with earth and sky he'd recorded in his journals.