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There is a sad lesson in this: people must believe, even, if it must be so, in a lie. Without belief all is lost. And yet, like all blind faiths that seem to go so much against the evidence of reality, they in turn foster their own truths. As long as no fear is acknowledged, great things are possible and the punters are capable of feats of endurance and courage of which they never believed themselves capable.

—Death of a river guide, Richard Flanagan

But contradicting my rational mind is a knowledge that I was never previously aware of possessing. And the rational mind can only reason against that knowledge: that the spirit of the sleeping and the dying in the rainforest roam everywhere, see everything; that we know a great deal more about ourselves than we ever normally care to admit, except at the great moments of truth in our life, in love and hate, at birth and death. Beyond these moments our life seems as if it is one great voyage away from the truths we all encompass, our past and our future, what we were and what we will return to being. And in that journey away our rational mind is our guide, our mentor. But no longer. The rational mind is not persuaded by the knowledge - my knowledge - that everything I am seeing is true, that everything I see has happened.

—Death of a river guide, Richard Flanagan