“We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.”

“At every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.”

“I exist on an imaginary tightrope and must watch every step, lest I fall into the cold, dark abyss. I live in constant fear of the future, in fear that the inevitable will take place,and I live in constant fear of the past, in fear that what has already happened will happen again. How can the present exist in such a world?”

“O your life, your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by, thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.”

“Memories are peculiar...You think the past is there, all fixed and stable, but it is really chock full of surprises and endlessly susceptible to change...So maybe it is true that we are constantly rewriting our past; they are not something fixed and unchangeable for all time. There is a basic structure, of course, a canvas stretched across boards, which cannot be remodeled at will, but the surface of that canvas can be shaded, rearranged, touched up, continually worked on to correspond to the needs of the present. In fact, the present moment is largely the focal point from which you shape the direction of your future and juggle the implications of your past.”

“The time where we are most likely to change is when we are at the edge of the abyss. The moment of our darkest fears, that time each of us must face, is also the instant of our most brilliant clarity.”