Peter Levi

“The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne's generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific.”
― Peter Levi, The Light Garden of the Angel King: Travels in Afghanistan with Bruce Chatwin

“A bald, white-bearded man who looked like a scholar was poring over a book in his cell; the scholarship of mystical religions is not a tradition into which one can easily intrude, since even more than other kinds of learning it includes a certain deliberate ignorance and darkness; but the thought of such an old man is not to be dismissed.”
― Peter Levi, The Light Garden of the Angel King: Travels in Afghanistan with Bruce Chatwin