One can choose life, or choose death. Having chosen life, I must live it as it is.

We must learn to give ourselves permission to blunder, to fail, and to make fools of ourselves every day for the rest of our lives. We do so in any case.

So it is that there is nothing to be taught, but yet there is something to be learned.

Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty. (10)

Openness to my own dreams puts me in touch with the oldest, most human aspects of who I am; it helps me find my place in the community of man.

I have long trusted dreams as prophetic visions. I do not mean that they foretell the future, only that they illuminate the present, when my eyes are closed, so that I may see clearly.

For each of us, the only hope resides in his own efforts, in completing his own story, not in the other's interpretation. (63)