No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

But youth isn't happy. Youth is sadder than age.

. . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.

a successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions.

What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.

Nobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity.