Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say "more perfect" because she said if a thing is perfect it can't be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it.

One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash.

...life every now and then becomes literature...as if life had been made and not happened.

Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts.

At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.

The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.