Loren Eiseley

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”

“We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests, and hissed in the uncouth guise of reptiles.”

“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.”

“The truth is, we are all potential fossils, and the fossil record of any one of us is likely to be imperfect.”

“One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”

“It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness.”

“The journey is difficult, immense, at times impossible, yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it.”

“Each of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born.”

“The writer must be a transcendent reporter. So must the scientist.”

“We are all potential fossils.”

“The creative act is a letting down of the net of things into the stream of time.”

“Every man is a manipulator of signs, a seeker of identities.”

“Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative man is to be really understood.”

“A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, approval, disapproval, and for all of this, memory provides the dark backing.”

“It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster... consuming nature.”