Fun comes hard - like, alas, its prarens, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue.

Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything

I must play the instrument I've got.

...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.

Unless you're completely exploded, there's always something to be grateful for.

He believed that he must, that he could and would recover the good things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven. The time wasted--must be relinquished. What else could one do about it? Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again. Recovery was possible.

I have begun in old age to understand...that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others.