The desert became grim, dark and foreboding. A silence of death lay over the land, and it seemed as though the very stars held their breath and twinkled no more.

The moonlight covered the tombstones with an ethereal glow, and the statues
above the tombs stood like silent guards waiting for something to happen.

To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus...

The day we stop learning is the day we die.

This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams...