Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.

The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself

The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.

Translating is writing.

If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory." Translation by David Downie

I could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writers—the emotional storage is done very early on.

The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.