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1) "Somebody once wrote that we should be capable of dying young. Not in the sense of really dying, but in the sense of stopping what we're doing when we realize we've exhausted our desire to do it, or our strength, or when we realize we've reached the limit of our talent, if we have any. Everything that comes after that limit is repetition. We should be capable of dying young in order to stay alive, but that almost never happens. I'd often thought that thanks to what I'd earned in my profession, of which I'd only spent a small part, I could quit, sell the practice and devote myself to something else. Travel, studying, reading. Maybe trying to write. Anything just to escape the grip of time. Time that kept passing, never changing. Nearly motionless in its daily repetition, yet fading fast."

2) "The only things I remember clearly are the beginning and the end."

3) "The seafront was metaphysically beautiful. The air limpid, at once weightless and tangible. The perspective of the cast-iron lampposts suggested an army of spirit guides placed there to defend the city. On a day like this, if I'd had more time and gone a few miles further south, I'd have been able to see, clear in the distance, the outline of the Gargano promontory."

4) "Whenever I look back, whenever I look at the bigger picture of my actions, my emotions (including, above all, those I wasn't aware of), my ambiguous victories and very obvious defeats, I recognize certain fault lines, the results of subterranean upheavals in my consciousness. One of these is situated in that period in 1987. I went in a boy and came out, without realizing it, a man.

The encounter between Lorenza and me changed my life. I'm sure it didn't change hers.

She had been my involuntary mentor, the woman who had distractedly accompanied me through a metaphorical wood for a few months. Having emerged from that wood, I found myself alone in the open, dangerous spaces of adulthood."

1) "Fu Inlé means 'after moonrise.' Rabbits, of course, have no idea of precise time or of punctuality. In this respect they are much the same as primitive people, who often take several days over assembling for some purpose and then several more to get started. Before such people can act together, a kind of telepathic feeling has to flow through them and ripen to the point when they all know that they are ready to begin. Anyone who has seen the martins and swallows in September, assembling on the telephone wires, twittering, making short flights singly and in groups over the open, stubbly fields, returning to form longer and even longer lines above the yellowing verges of the lanes—the hundreds of individual birds merging and blending, in a mounting excitement, into swarms, and these swarms coming loosely and untidily together to create a great, unorganized flock, thick at the center and ragged at the edges, which breaks and re-forms continually like clouds or waves—until that moment when the greater part (but not all) of them know that the time has come: they are off, and have begun once more that great southward flight which many will not survive; anyone seeing this has seen at work the current that flows (among creatures who think of themselves primarily as part of a group and only secondarily, if at all, as individuals) to fuse them together and impel them into action without conscious thought or will: has seen at work the angel which drove the First Crusade into Antioch and drives the lemmings into the sea."

2) "'Are you sure we've got to cross the river, Fiver? What about going along the bank one way or the other?'

'No, we need to cross the river, Hazel, so that we can get into those fields—and on beyond them too. I know what we ought to be looking for—a high, lonely place with dry soil, where rabbits can see and hear all round and men hardly ever come. Wouldn't that be worth a journey?'

'Yes, of course it would. But is there such a place?'"

3) "'I don't like straight lines: men make them.'"

4) "'Hrairoo,' said Hazel one evening, 'what would we have done without you? We'd none of us be here, would we?'

'You're sure we are here, then?' asked Fiver.

'That's too mysterious for me,' replied Hazel. 'What do you mean?'

'Well, there's another place—another country, isn't there? We go there when we sleep; at other times, too; and when we die. El-ahrairah comes and goes between the two as he wants, I suppose, but I could never quite make that out, from the tales. Some rabbits will tell you it's all easy there, compared with the waking dangers that they understand. But I think that only shows they don't know much about it. It's a wild place, and very unsafe. And where are we really—there or here?'"

5) "Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree. The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter."

1) "Fawcett had determined that an ancient, highly cultured people still existed in the Brazilian Amazon and that their civilization was so old and sophisticated it would forever alter the Western view of the Americas. He had christened this lost world the City of Z. 'The central place I call 'Z'–our main objective–is in a valley... about ten miles wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it, approached by a barreled roadway of stone,' Fawcett had stated earlier. 'The houses are low and windowless, and there is a pyramidal temple.'"

2) "From its source, the river descends sharply. As it gathers speed, it is joined by hundreds of other rivulets, most of them so small they remain nameless. Seven thousand feet down, the water enters a valley with the first glimmers of green. Soon larger streams converge upon it. Churning toward the plains below, the river has three thousand more miles to go to reach the ocean. It is unstoppable. So, too, is the jungle, which, owing to equatorial heat and heavy rainfalls, gradually engulfs the riverbanks. Spreading toward the horizon, this wilderness contains the greatest variety of species in the world. And, for the first time, the river becomes recognizable–it is the Amazon."

3) "Finally, in the nineteenth century, as the British Empire was increasingly expanding, several English scientists, admirals, and merchants believed that an institution was needed to create a map of the world based on observation rather than on imagination, an organization that detailed both the contours of the earth and everything that lay within them. And so, in 1830, the Royal Geographical Society of London was born. According to its mission statement, the Society would 'collect, digest and print... new interesting facts and discoveries;' build a repository of 'the best books on geography' and 'a complete collection of maps;' assemble the most sophisticated surveying equipment; and help launch explorers on their travels. All this was part of its mandate to chart every nook and cranny of the earth. 'There was not a square foot of the planet's surface to which Fellows of this Society should not at least try to go,' a later president of the institution vowed. 'That is our business. That is what we are out for.'"

4) "Poring through the log, I noticed a word on the margins of one page: 'DEAD.' I looked at it more closely and saw two other words alongside it. They spelled out 'DEAD HORSE CAMP.' Underneath them were coordinates, and I quickly flipped through my notebook where I had scribbled down the position of the camp from Exploration Fawcett. They were significantly different. For hours, I went through the diaries, taking notes. I thought there was nothing left to glean, when Rolette appeared and said that she wanted to show me one more item. She vanished into the back room, and I could hear her rummaging through drawers and cabinets, muttering to herself. After several minutes, she emerged with a photograph from a book. 'I don't know where I put it,' she said. 'But I can at least show you a picture of it.' It was a photograph of Fawcett's gold signet ring, which was engraved with the family motto, 'Nee Aspera Terrent'–essentially, 'Difficulties Be Damned.'"

5) "Colonel T. E. Lawrence–the celebrated desert spy and explorer better known as Lawrence of Arabia–had volunteered to go with Fawcett on his next journey in search of Z, but Fawcett was wary of choosing a companion with a powerful ego who was unaccustomed to the Amazon. As Fawcett wrote to a friend, '[Lawrence] may be keen upon S. American exploration but in the first place he probably requires a salary I cannot pay him and in the second place excellent work in the Near East does not infer the ability or willingness to hump a 60 lbs pack, live for a year upon the forest, suffer from legions of insects and accept the conditions which I would impose.' Fawcett told Jack that, instead of Lawrence, he could take part in the expedition. It would be one of the most difficult and dangerous expeditions in the history of exploration-the ultimate test, in Fawcett's words, 'of faith, courage, and determination.'"

6) "Originally, Fawcett had described Z in strictly scientific terms and with caution: 'I do not assume that 'The City' is either large or rich.' But by 1924 Fawcett had filled his papers with reams of delirious writings about the end of the world and about a mystical Atlantean kingdom, which resembled the Garden of Eden. Z was transformed into 'the cradle of all civilizations' and the center of one of Blavatsky's 'White Lodges,' where a group of higher spiritual beings helped to direct the fate of the universe. Fawcett hoped to discover a White Lodge that had been there since 'the time of Atlantis,' and to attain transcendence."