John D. MacDonald/Travis McGee

"...to me organized religion, the formalities and routines, it's like being marched in formation to look at a sunset."
T. McGee, A Deadly Shade of Gold

Beryl Markham - West With the Night

"She was a little like the eccentric genius who, after being asked by his host why he had rubbed the broccoli in his hair at dinner, apologized with a bow from the waist and said he had thought it was spinach."

Hemingway said that she “has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.”

RIP, Jack

“My witness is the empty sky.”

Rabindranath Tagore - (“My soul is alight...”)

 

III

My soul is alight with your infinitude of stars. Your world has broken upon me like a flood. The flowers of your garden blossom in my body. The joy of life that is everywhere burns like an incense in my heart. And the breath of all things plays on my life as on a pipe of reeds. 

More on the author 

Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness

"The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness."

Picture source

Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

 

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”

James Lee Burke - Swan Peak

"How do you explain to yourself the casual manner
in which you threw your life away?"

 

Author's web site

Loren Eiseley - The Immense Journey

"For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief into the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness."

Ernest Hemingway

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Wind, Sand and Stars

"No doubt somewhere there did sit young girls among their white lemurs or their books, secretly compounding souls as rich in delights as secret gardens."

Ted Berrigan - A Certain Slant of Sunlight

"...I’ll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight..."