But my gloom did not lessen. I knew that I'd had a bad dream, and I stood in the dark trying to recollect it. The second I closed my eyes, I was with the dead. They did things words cannot express. They spoke madness. ("Hanka")

Each soul must accomplish its task, or it would not have been sent here.

The more you see what other people do, the more you learn about yourself.

What happened was no accident. Everything was preordained. True, the will was free, but heaven also made its ordinances.

Of course I believe in free will. Do we have a choice?

While the poet entertains he continues to search for eternal truths, for the essence of being. In his own fashion he tries to solve the riddle of time and change, to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice. Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet--whom Plato banned from his Republic--may rise up to save us all.

In our time, when the literature for adults is deteriorating, good books for children are the only hope, the only refuge.