I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.

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 breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.

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.

For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.