“One knows a little too much about everybody. And we can even see through some men, and yet we can by no means pass through them.”

“And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words ― We will pass just as quietly through life (passing through, passing through) as the 10th century people of this valley only with a little more noise and a few bridges and dams and bombs that wont even last a million years ― The world being just what it is, moving and passing through, actually alright in the long view and nothing to complain about.”

“It makes you wonder. How much you can know about a thing, a person. If you can know anything at all. Maybe no one’s who we think they are. No one. Makes you doubt yourself, wonder if you even know yourself or if you’ve been lyin, too, along with everybody else.”

“We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.”

“Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.”

“Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.”