the difficult art I was attempting had, indeed a powerful fascination, before which the past faded, the future receded, and the whole of experience narrowed down to this stretch of glancing, glimmering water, and the fly I was trying to cast across it.

The best way of forgetting how you think you feel is to concentrate on what you know you know.

To plant a garden is the chief of the arts of peace.

It seems to me you can be awfully happy in this life if you stand aside and watch and mind your own business, and let other people do as they like about damaging themselves and one another. You go on kidding yourself that you're impartial and tolerant and all that, then all of a sudden you realize you're dead, and you've never been alive at all.

It does not do to neglect the gods of a place, whoever they may be. In the end, they are all one.

I can say 'reduce your stress level' until I'm blue in the face.

The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.