He was crying in despair. Then he spoke aloud, to himself, in English. “Who are you?” he said. “And where do you belong?” His own body stared back at him; but he could not recognize it as his own. It was alien, and frightening.

Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth [Amazon, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Tevis The Man Who Fell to Earth crying despair spoke aloud to himself in english who are you where belong obdy stared back could not recognize alien frightening

Consider also:

  1. “But in this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous, and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry, and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved. An algebra too unstable properly to be computed, it is human-shaped and god-shaped, not pure and mathematical.”
  2. “The towers, dead at the top, lacked the guidance of enlightened, purified souls”
  3. A Rendezvous in Averoigne
  4. “They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humanity; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountainhead.”
  5. “As for the rest we wait till the world changes and its reflection changes in our mirror and an hieratical society returns, power descending from the few to the many, from the subtle to the gross, not because some man’s policy has decreed it but because what is so overwhelming cannot be restrained. A new beginning, a new turn of the wheel.”