“But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.”

“It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.”

“I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.”

“He was in that mostly empty-headed state of grace which is sometimes such fertile soil ; it's the ground from which our brightest dreams and biggest ideas (both good and spectacularly bad) suddenly burst forth, often full-blown.”

“we deceive ourselves in thinking that death only follows life whereas it both goes before and will follow after it for where is the difference in not beginning or ceasing to exist the effect of both is not to be”

“...Unaccustomed sense of peace did not depend on...'the whim of any fallible creature, or...economic security, or the weather. I don't know where it comes from. Jung states that such serenity is always a miracle...I am so glad that the therapists of my maturity and the saints of my childhood agree on one thing.”