“...in the intoxication of falling, man was prone to believe himself propelled upward.”

“Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.”

“He looked like a man who was turning into paper, folding himself into origami angles, fragile and friable and prone to crumple.”

“But this would have been to ignore the young man of only twenty-five, who, for all his, by now, increasing and debilitating proneness to thought, still possessed, in spite of himself, a healthy animal nature. He falls in love, heavily, thickly, thankfully (is there any other way?). He is still--thank God--open to experience. He sees himself, indeed, as "saved"--returned to the sweet, palpable goodness of the world.”

“Intoxicating joy it is for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, the world once seemed to me.”

“An atheist is a man who believes himself an accident.”