Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.

There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.

This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.

If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.