Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped. ‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like— many years from now.

If I could make you stay, I would,’ he shouted. ‘If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you—if I could make you stay, I would.’ He turned back into the room; the wind blew his hair. He shook his finger at me, grotesquely playful. ‘One day, perhaps, you will wish I had.

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]

To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.