We’re such contrary creatures

I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.

All the things we achieve are things we have first of all imagined.

What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?

Now that spring is no longer to be recognised in blossoms or in new leaves on trees, I must look for it in myself. I feel the ice of myself cracking. I feel myself loosen and flow again, reflecting the world. That is what spring means.

We are continuous with all the particles of our physical being, as in our breathing we are continuous with the sky. Between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce.

Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.