“If you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.”

“I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.”

“Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.”

“It's your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the stream""I wish I could believe that life really is something more than a stream that carries us along, belly-up""Alright, if it's a stream, you're still free to be in this part of it or that part, aren't you? The water will divide again and again. If you bump, and tussle, and fight, and make use of whatever advantages you might have-""Oh, that's fine, I'm sure, when you have advantages.""You'd find them everywhere, if you ever bothered to look!”

“Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.”

“I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about -- the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of the box. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire; it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can't survive without being nurtured by water. And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you?”

“Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see. ”