"Don [Marquis} knew how lonely everybody is. "always the struggle of the human soul is to break through the barriers of silence and distance into companionship. Friendship, lust, love, art, religion-we rush into them pleading, fighting, clamoring for the touch of spirit laid against our spirit." Why else would you be reading this fragmentary page-you with the book in your lap? You're not out to learn anything, certainly. You just want the healing action of some chance corroboration, the soporific of spirit laid against spirit. Even if you read only to crab about everything I say, your letter of complaint is a dead give-away: you are unutterably lonely or you wouldn't have taken the trouble to write it."
- E.B. White
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"If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business."
-Henry David Thoreau