We traveled long and forgot why poetry was invented.

When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor my grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.

A person who does not know the history of the last 3,000 years wanders in the darkness of ignorance, unable to make sense of the reality around him

Our lot may be all-seeing and all-knowing, but that’s a long way removed from all-understanding.

We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn't know what we were doing. ... What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.

I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.

The further one goes, the less one knows.

We tried. It was not easy. At first, because of the language; language failed us. We would have to invent a new vocabulary, for our own words were inadequate, anemic. And then too, the people around us refused to listen; and even those who listened refused to believe; and even those who believed could not comprehend. Of course they could not. Nobody could. The experience of the camps defies comprehension.

The perception of time among these mostly illiterate thirteenth-century inhabitants of may at first strike the twentieth-century reader as vague at best. They did not always know exactly how old they were, and their sense of history was strictly local.

It is hard to think away out of our heads a history which has long lain in a remote past but which once lay in the future.

It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.

They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was too much to be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects.

I could not have told where those damned islands were within 2,000 miles."

I can't remember those words (Lyrics) even when we were on tour.