“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”

“No star is ever lost we once have seen,We always may be what we might have beenSince Good, though only thought,Has life and breath -God's life - can always be redeemed from death.And evil in its nature is decay,And any hour may blot it all away.The hope that lost in some far distance seems,May be the truer life, and this the dream.”

“Have we not all, amid life's petty strife,Some pure ideal of a noble lifeThat once seemed possible? Did we not hearThe flutter of its wings, and feel it near,And just within our reach? It was. And yetWe lost it in this daily jar and fret,And now live idle in a vague regret.But still our place is kept, and it will wait,Ready for us to fill it, soon or late:No star is ever lost we once have seen,We always may be what we might have been.Since Good, though only thought, has life and breath,God's life--can always be redeemed from death;And evil, in its nature, is decay,And any hour can blot it all away;The hopes that lost in some far distance seem,May be the truer life, and this the dream.”

“This is the real drama for me; the belief that we all, you see, think of ourselves as one single person: but it's not true: each of us is several different people, and all these people live inside us. With one person we seem like this and with another we seem very different. But we always have the illusion of being the same person for everybody and of always being the same person in everything we do. But it's not true! It's not true! We find this out for ourselves very clearly when by some terrible chance we're suddenly stopped in the middle of doing something and we're left dangling there, suspended. We realize then, that every part of us was not involved in what we'd been doing and that it would be a dreadful injustice of other people to judge us only by this one action as we dangle there, hanging in chains, fixed for all eternity, as if the whole of one's personality were summed up in that single, interrupted action.”

“‎Life is worth living really but only if we believe it is, if we believe further that life is eternal not because the tissues last forever, but because the imagination never dies”

“[...] I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life [...]”