Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.

Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.

These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

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.