Algernon Blackwood

“ And his loneliness in that temple attic under the stars, his loneliness, too, had a meaning I did not fail to understand later, and why he was always available for me and seemed to belong to no other.
"To every one who finds me," he said, with the strange smile that wrapped his whole being and not his face alone, "to every one I am the same, and yet different. I am not really ever alone. The whole world, nay"—his voice rose to a singing cry—"the whole universe lies in this room, or just beyond that window-pane; for here past and future meet and all real dreams find completeness. ”

“ It was dusty and unswept, yet it was utterly unsoiled; and the Old Man of Visions who lived there, for all his shabby and stained garments, his uncombed beard and broken shoes, stood within it door revealed in his real self, moving in a sort of divine whiteness, iridescent, shining, And here, in this attic (lampless and unswept) , high up under the old roofs of Bloomsbury, the window scarred with rain and the corners dropping cobwebs, I heard his silver whisper issue from the shadows:
"Here may you satisfy you soul's desire and may commune with the Invisibles ”

“ What may solve is not lost for lack of either speech or action for the true mystic is ever the true man of action, and my thought will reach others as soon as they are ready for it in the same way that it reaches you. ”

“ I give them all sympathy out of my stores of knowledge and experience, and they give me what kindness I need. My outer shell lies within impenetrable solitude, for only so can my inner life move freely along the paths and terraces that are thronged with the beings to whom I belong. ”

“ To reach the stage of intimacy where actual speech is a hindrance to close understanding, one need not in some cases have spoken at all, thus by merely setting my mind, and above all my imagination, into tune with his, and by steeping myself so much in his atmosphere that I absorbed and then gave back to him with my own stamp the forces he exhaled, it was at length possible to persuade those vast-seeing eyes to turn in my direction ”

“ And poetry such was never known of heard before clothed all he uttered, yet even when took no form in actual words, for it was of the substance of aspiration and yearning, voicing adequately all the busy, high-born dreams that haunt the soul yet never live in the uttered line. ”

“ And when I asked him how he maintained such deep sympathy with humanity, and yet absolved himself apparently from action as from speech, he stopped against an area railing and turned his eyes to my face, as though their fire could communicate his thought without the husk of words:
"I have peered too profoundly into life and beyond it," he murmured, "and wish to express in language what I know. Action is not for all, always ”