You went around back, where in the playground kids were dangling from the jungle gym waiting for mothers; connie could feel their cold skinned knees … - John Crowley

The Chinese, you know, believe that deep within each of us, no larger than the ball of your thumb, is the garden of the immortals, the great valley where we are all king forever.

Not until the lamp is utterly shattered,” she said, “and all pages everywhere sealed up in mildew — but then one would only cease to be, wouldn’t one? Till then, simply changelessness. How deliciously restful. It’s what one wanted, isn’t it, what one had prepared for and sought after — what one had invented out of all the terrible longings and dissatisfactions, never knowing that this exactly was what one was inventing — and yet having no other reason, all along, but this. How pleasant and odd that it should be so….

Travel backward to a lost land heard of in childhood; find it to be incomprehensible, rich, strange; then discover it is the place from which you set out.