John Darling: It’s kind of like group therapy, looking back on what we’ve been through — and so much of it with the people in this room. We get to be honest. This was hard, we say, and that was amazing and good and we’re better people for it. I hope I can say this again next year.

John Darling: The labyrinth affirms this right off by taking you straightaway nearly to the center, the goal, then diverts you away to these winding, Byzantine switchbacks to nowhere, which serve the purpose of frustrating the mind and ego and all its sense of right-wrong, good-bad, success-failure — and it’s oh-so-dear need for control.

John Darling: John Kennedy needed help. I helped him. He was trying to get off a stage after a speech in Lansing so he could shake hands with people. He asked if he could put his hand on my shoulder and get down. I said sure. He had a bad back. I didn’t.

John Darling: I was in rapture. All trees, hills, clouds, every atom revealed its knowing love to me and took me into its secrets. This went on for 20 minutes, then faded, leaving a delicious afterglow.

John Darling: It’s getting warmer all over the world and it’s because of us. We’ve established that as fact now, but we’ve never warmed the globe before and we don’t know what it means. It’s human nature to plunge onward and find out, so we are.

John Darling: “The ‘it’ I am looking for is that elusive, usually sentimentalized, grossly exploited thing called Christmas Spirit — which is supposed to be a giddy, blessed, childlike abandonment of the normal hurried, self-centered, worried, grabby, type-A personality we have the rest of the year.”

John Darling: “I don’t want to go to France. I want to be here. I want to drive through the leafy streets of Ashland, where I’ve gotten used to the slow pace of traffic.”

John Darling: “Fall has no illusions. Three-fourths of the way through the year, like three-fourths of the way through life, you know what is possible.”

John Darling: “Even though it’s trying to become a hyper-spender geezerville, that’s not gonna happen. It’s a city now, not a town, and that means it’s a mix and the people who happen to be young and poor and have kids will always find ways to live here and bring in those new streams of energy.”

John Darling: “As Helman built his mills around Ashland’s Plaza (essentially creating Ashland), the locals fought for the homes they held for 12,000 years. The settlers occasionally had to hole up at a fort built on Wagner Creek. Within five years from the first claim here, the Shastas and Takelmas were gone, decimated by our diseases or removed to remote reservations ….”