History, the winnowing wind, never halts. We see the chaff rise, forget the waiting grain, seed of the future, fallen to the threshing floor. We never learn, but live on, slit-narrow, as if our living were a pencil line traced upon paper, behaving as trapped denizens of a flat world hemmed in by the bigoted horizon of our own making. Yet the meaning of living is a pushing back, a pulling down of the great walls and domes of fear and ignorance, is relinquishing the nest for the sky, ignorance for understanding. The look back is also a look forward.

No single crisis shapes a generation; but a succession of events, each one bringing its shaping blows to bear.

Persecution matures young rebels.

Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.

Strange are the ways of history, where no single thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging.

A family is a burial mound of its own doings and sayings.

There is nothing stronger in the world than gentleness.