“There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home.”

Caves so often symbolize rebirth. It’s a hidden space, an expected, inscrutable space. Strange things live in there – eyeless salamanders, albino fish, a prophet’s epiphanies.

In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities.

Things in the margins, including humans who wander there, are often on the brink of becoming someone else, or something else, whose memory may not include the significance of old markers.

Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.

going into a cave might be like going inside one’s own mind, crawling around in the pitch-black, nook-and-crannied labyrinth of the human psyche.

To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing.

Silence arrests flight, so that in its refuge, the need to flee the chaos of noise diminishes. We let the world creep closer, we drop to our knees, as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get its legs on the ground.

Furthermore, this pattern is seen across all the advanced economies, and isn’t just a feature of some special subset (e.g. the Anglo-Saxons).

Paul ripped off John’s right arm and used it to slap John across the face, then he said, “Those’re horrible, mate, just horrible, y’know.

Waiting is a huge part of being a refugee. You’re waiting at borders to get across. You’re waiting for transportation.

Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.

That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.

I let a tarantula walk across my hand, and I ate rat soup.

Don’t I yearn for the days when a draw across the throat made f**king resolution.