“I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming... suddenly you find - at the age of 50, say - that a whole new life has opened before you.”

“(I)f you do not believe that hearts can bloom suddenly bigger, and that love can open like a flower out of even the hardest places, then I am afraid that for you the road will be long and brown and barren, and you will have trouble finding the light. But if you do believe, then you already know all about magic.”

“Firstly, by learning the great lesson of wise men: patience, the certainty that everything - both good and bad - is provisional in this life. Secondly, using this sudden change of course to risk new things in daily life, to do things you always dreamed of.”

“You need to be buried deep in the dirt before you can find your bloom.”

“Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment.”

“If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”