Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.

How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.