“There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.”

“The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.”

“Everything alive is part of each of us, and many things which do not move as we move are part of us. The sun is part of us, the earth, the sky, the stars, the rivers, and the oceans. All things are part of us, and we have come here to enjoy them and to thank God for them.”

“For it is the young tree grown out of the old root which shall illuminate what the old tree has been in its wonders.”

“We have possessed virtually nothing in our life in Italy. In England, I became increasingly sure that to possess something was to arrest your knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession. But there is an element of death in knowledge (...) Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost. It is the reliquary of the vanished object. Its presence is painful, because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.”

“All right," said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.”