I don't believe in God, but I miss him.

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.

When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?

Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.

You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?