A letter makes ordinary things seem important.

Of course, mysticism is very hard to isolate because, given the kind of consciousness that I was sort of instructed in as religious consciousness; that borders on mysticism so closely that it's hard to know whether you qualify or not, or whether mysticism is artificially isolated when it is treated as a separate thing from experience. Obviously, mysticism can be a form of madness, but then consciousness can be a form of madness.

It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.

The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either.

... but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.

There are worries that seem to me sustained by the love of worry. For example, that people are reading from screens, or listening to recorded books. Why scold the impulse to enjoy language and narrative in whatever form it takes?

More generally, people who lived in a period when maternal, infant and childhood mortality were still high would have been tougher than most of us can imagine.