We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.

Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.

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

When I was quite young I fondly imagined that all foreign languages were codes for English. I thought that "hat," say, was the real and actual name of the thing, but that people in other countries, who obstinately persisted in speaking the code of their forefathers, might use the word "ibu," say, to designate not merely the concept hat, but the English word "hat." I knew only one foreign word, "oui," and since it had three letters as did the word for which it was a code, it seemed, touchingly enough, to confirm my theory.

Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.