“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”

-J. D. Salinger

“All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.”

- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

"I asked the boy beneath the pines. He said: the Master's gone alone, herb-picking somewhere on the mount, cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.”

-Chia Tao, Searching for the Hermit in Vain