“I stopped in front of a florist's window. Behind me, the screeching and throbbing boulevard vanished. Gone, too, were the voices of newspaper vendors selling their daily poisoned flowers. Facing me, behind the glass curtain, a fairyland. Shining, plump carnations, with the pink voluptuousness of women about to reach maturity, poised for the first step of a sprightly dance; shamelessly lascivious gladioli; virginal branches of white lilac; roses lost in pure meditation, undecided between the metaphysical white and the unreal yellow of a sky after the rain.”

“The garden has wrapped itself in autumn haze. An unusual autumn, lacking that thrill of vegetal warmth when the sap is still alive and holds up the trees, drunk on solar gold. It is the sorrowful climax of a summer's drought. Never before was I so struck by the cancerous emaciation in a garden. The leaves started turning yellow in July and began falling, like a dance of prematurely withered bodies.”

“The fatigue I've gathered year after year and stored inside now heaves a muted cry of helplessness. Nothing but fatigue, rounding my shoulders, heavier than ever on this late autumn day with a useless sun, a world of unforgiving disasters. So many struggles and tragedies, so much sorrow and egotism in this dark, in this rotting century of hate.”

“Strong people alone know how to organize their suffering so as to bear only the most necessary pain.”

“Meditate but one hour upon the self’s nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man,” said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect to a Western visitor. Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over the world’s unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything.”

“A thin yellow curtain hung in front of the corner window as boney tree limbs tapped on the glass like an unwelcome visitor. Despite the tiny buds on the trees outside, the branch at this particular window was still bare.”

“That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.”