Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.

You are a Queen. Let mine be the joy of giving you your kingdom.

We can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough. But the tremendous effort needed- one doesn't always want to make it-does one? ... But what else can be done? What's the alternative? What do you want most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.

No, no the mind I love must still have wild places - a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown litde wood, the chance of a snake or two (real snakes), a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with those litde flowers planted by the wind.

we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves.

That is the fearful part of having been near death. One knows how easy it is to die. The barriers that are up for everybody else are down for you, and you've only to slip through.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?