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.

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.

What is sanity, after all, except the control of madness?

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

... love and fear increase together with a precision almost mathematical: the greater the love is then the greater the fear is.

Freedom is no guarantee of anything. It is only defined today by what it is not. What it is takes forms strange and of infinite variety - bizarre as in a masquerade.

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.