It's an odd feeling-farewell-there is some envy in it. Men go off to be tested for courage and if we're tested at all, it's for patience, for doing without, for how well we can endure loneliness.

Here and there, in some older houses, old faded daguerreotypes still hang on the walls... They seem to us to be very simple... compared with the artistic and skillful portraits made in later days... Here was a photograph that at one time had been the last word, a very modern portrait... Today it is just a part of cultural history. The small yellowed surface has acquired depth, an admonishing perspective. We hold in our hand a symbol of the structure and ideology of an epoch.

There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them.

You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my "life has been wasted" here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know.

It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.

And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.

I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch... and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order... by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.