We Americans, with our terrific emphasis on youth, action, and material success, certainly tend to belittle the afternoon of life and even to pretend it never comes. We push the clock back and try to prolong the morning, over-reaching and over-straining ourselves in the unnatural effort. ... In our breathless attempts we often miss the flowering that waits for afternoon.

If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

To be deeply in love is, of course, a great liberating force.

Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before.

For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.

Go for a short walk in a soft rain - lovely - so many wild flowers startling me through the woods and a lawn sprinkled with dandelions, like a night with stars. And through it all the sound of soft rain like the sound of innumerable earthworms stirring in the ground.

And if flying, like a glass-bottomed bucket, can give you that vision, that seeing eye, which peers down on the still world below the choppy waves - it will always remain magic.