"'I'd been worn out in this piece of work, and when I finished I was free, free all of a sudden out in the world. In the street everything was unfamiliar, everything and everyone I saw was unreal. And then I saw this thing. When I saw it all of a sudden everything was freed into one recognition, really freed into reality that we never see, you never see it. You don't see it in paintings because most of the time you can't see beyond a painting'" (Part 1, Chapter 3, pg. 91-92.)

"The alchemist, for Otto, was likely an unsophisticated man of a certain age assisting in a smelly hallucination over an open fire, tampering with the provenience of absolutes, as Bernard of Treves and an unnamed Franciscan are pictured seeking the universal dissolvent in the 15th Century with a mixture of mercury, salt, molten lead and human excrement...