“Gabriel Levin’s book is a journey through time and through entrenched animosities of the Middle East.”

Defend the value of the spiritual experience and if somebody tells you it’s an old fashioned notion, laugh loudly and serenely.

The odds and ends of your mental surplus you carelessly throw at the world, one wants to be at a loss, in a maze; amazed, and amazingly unabashed.

And tracing the labyrinthine ways of your mind, the haphazard vagaries of your thoughts at ease,

Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head.

But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition…

I drink from a small spring, / my thirst excedes the ocean.

A brilliant poet is at work here-a poet in the rugged landscape of conflict and pain.

Be sober, be intelligent, be educated, rely on the tangible reality as long as you can.

As if entrapped in a tropical heatwave, with dozens of whirlwinds swirling in one’s mind, one thinks of a way out, or a way in: out of the scorching bosom of a volcano, and in – into the centre of a raging hurricane.

A blessing because it brings about a movement, an energy which, when it peaks, creates a poem. Or a moment of happiness.

Remember that the act of writing is a tiny part of a bigger something.

And now, advice for beginning mystics.

In summer the empire of insects spreads.

He replied: the ubiquity of sparrows.

A little rain, a little blood. Black fingernails in August; and going berserk, going bananas.

A certain traveler who knew many continents was asked what he found most remarkable of all.