“The most impoverished peasant can be delighted by the opening of the first spring flower, and the most wealthy aristocrat can curse the day he was born because of some petty offense to his sensibilities. She is a very wise woman. To achieve serenity we have to view life not as it is measured by the world around us but as we ourselves measure it. We must accept that the scales are not at all equal.”

“We now know most things that can be measured in this world, except the bounds of human ambition!”

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”

“We may seem the weakest and most insignificant of all the Realms, but our strength comes in other ways. We have what no other race has: imagination. Any one of us, even the lowliest, can create worlds within ourselves; we can people them with the most extraordinary creatures, the most amazing inventions, the most incredible things. We can live in those worlds ourselves, if we choose; and in our own worlds, we can be as we want to be. Imagination is as close as we will ever be to godhead, Poison, for in imagination, we can create wonders.”

“Life is rather above the measure of us all (save for a very few perhaps). We all need literature that is above our measure--though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time.”

“We have no means of understanding a fraction of the thought and science and philosophy and law that have gone to make that outside world. We simply accept it. We have grown up paying tribute to it, and that is all the most of us can do. We feel of the great world that it is simply there, something for the lucky ones to explore, and then only at the edges. It never occurs to us that we might make some contribution to it ourselves. And that is why we miss everything.”