when a gourd is hollowed out it becomes empty and is of great use to the world because of its emptiness.

will anything but fanaticism make for change? Wisdom and compromise come later.

When we live with a memory we live with a corpse; the impact of the experience has changed us once but can never change us again.

... people misunderstood death, they died not of too little life but of too much life, that as the skin withered and the future grew short it was the past that took on flesh, until ultimately the sheer accumulation of experience and memory became too heavy to carry.

when a gourd is hollowed out it becomes empty and is of great use to the world because of its emptiness.

my rebelliousness went so deep that, faced with a can of asparagus that instructed me to open at this end, I always, stubbornly, opened it at the other.

... old clothes, old friends, old books. One needs constants in a traveling life.