And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.

The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

We live by action—by acting on desire. Those of us who don't know how to want—whether geniuses or beggars—are related by impotence.

THIRD WATCHER Let her speak. Don't interrupt. She knows words that mermaids taught her...I'm falling asleep in order to hear her...Go on, sister, go on...My heart aches because I wasn't you when you dreamed at the seashore.

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.