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

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

Old people who live too long come to resemble turtles. As though time turned in a curve, and down they go to the reptiles again. Not the little wet naked frog they were born. But the tortoise. Cold eyes, sagging circles of skin, the nose becomes beak. The shell of sleep.

The things we felt most are hardest to put into words. Hate is always easier to speak of than love. How shall I make love go through the sieve of words and come out something besides a pulp?

Teach the legal rights of trees, the nobility of hills; respect the beauty of singularity, the value of solitude.

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.