The question we do not see when we are young is whether we own pride or are owned by it.

Everything drops away, comes to be unimportant in the dark. It's like sleep almost. A freedom from self, from ugliness.

To have children is a double living, the earthly fountain of youth, a continual fresh delight, a volcano as well as a fountain, and also a source of weariness beyond description.

There is 'a time to be born' - and born again, free of accumulated, encrusted sores of fears and prejudices, old hates, of cancerous wounds, old prides. And there is a time to die - a time for the blue, unburied child of our young years to be decently interred - and to get on with the living.

in mad people fear goes on constantly, night and day, wearing one ditch in the mind that all thoughts must travel in.

We are dying of preconceptions, outworn rules, decaying flags, venomous religions, and sentimentalities. We need a new world. We've wrenched up all the old roots. The old men have no roots. They don't know it. They just go on talking and flailing away and falling down on the young with their tons of dead weight and their power. For the power is still there, in their life-in-death. But the roots are dead, and the land is poisoned for miles around them.

You can't be a little bit saintly any more than you can be a little bit pregnant.