In fact, at times I preferred to live in the forbidden world, and frequently my return home to the bright realm, no matter how necessary and good that might be, was almost like a return to someplace...

He brooded on how close destruction always was to all creatures, animals as well as humans, and he realized that there is nothing we can predict or know for certain in this world except death.

The sympathetic but sentimental man who sings the song of the blessed child also longs to return to nature, innocence, and the beginnings, but has completely forgotten that children are by no means...

Our thinking is a constant abstraction, a turning away of the gaze from the senses, an attempt to construct a purely spiritual world. Yet you favor precisely what is most unstable and mortal, and...

One of the disadvantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency to see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two...

One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.

That's the problem with wishes, they ensnare you. In fairy tales they're nothing but trouble, magnifying the greed and vanity of the person for whom they are granted.

Her very difficulty created friction, and friction led to satisfaction...

And later my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for myself, unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing "I just want to be loved," cursing the earth and everything I have been taught:...

Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was...

I find it magnificent how beautiful, loose ends find each other in the world if one only waits with decent patience, resilience, and quite blind strength.

The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling.

I have experienced life enough to realize that reality does not align with dreams, but its greatest joy now is to tell this reality that it does not need her and that her happiness is not linked to...

There is always someone somewhere in the world waiting for someone else; whether in the middle of the desert or deep within the greatest cities. When those two people meet and their gazes intertwine,...

Love is the force that transforms and improves the Soul of the World. When I first reached through to it, I thought the Soul of the World was perfect. But later I could see that it was like other...

I will at least have gained one ver

How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on...

Even God has a hell: his love of Mankind.

Sometimes you have to travel a long way to find what is near

Dreaming is very pleasant as long as you are not forced to put your dreams into practice.

Feelings do not grow old along with the body. Feelings form part of a world I don't know, but it's a world where there's no time, so space, no frontiers.

Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?

just because you have stopped believing in something you once were promised does not mean that the promise itself was a lie.

The exaltation of understanding; then understanding's bottomless regret.

The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.

We have made some progress, thought Gladstone, despite the inertia forced upon us by the Core. Despite the near-death of science. Despite our fatal addiction to the toys granted us by our own...

Driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will; She can, though every...

Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities.

The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals.

I'm not so sure innocence exists anymore.