I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.

No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.

Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.

What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?