A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.

I've lived my life again just telling it to you.

Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.

We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.