“‎"Does all the beauty of the world stop when you die?""No," said the Old Oak; "it will last much longer - longer than I can even think of.""Well, then," said the little May-fly, "we have the same time to live; only we reckon differently.”

“You will never disappear," I said. "Even if it may feel like you have at some point. We're going to remain a part of each other's lives for much longer than we think. There's nothing we can say or do to change that.”

“Well, sir. I look at facts. And the fact is that our world is dying and if we don't all do our best to save it, we aren't going to last much longer.”

“One by one the lights burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer, but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if ever there was a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing; that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn't as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous and shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.”

“We are free only when we no longer require health, however much we may prefer it.”

“Yes. A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. […] Consider a word that refers to a thing- “ umbrella”, for example. […] Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function. […] What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? […] the umbrella ceases to be an umbrella. It has changed into something else. The word, however, has remained the same. Therefore it can no longer express the thing.”