“I gaze upon the sky and seeWhat I want myself to be;A person who was here and gone,And whose memory will always live on.”

“There are indeed all sorts of men/ who visit here: those who want/ nothing but to talk or hear the soft tones/ of a woman's voice; others prefer/ simply to gaze upon me, my face/ turned from them as they touch/ only themselves. And then there are those,/ of course, whose desires I cannot commit/ to paper.”

“Know why I plant trees?""No.""I like thinking that they'll be here long after I'm gone. All those fine memories pushing up to the sky.”

“I want to be like the air. The good-hearted person whose kindness overflows and people realize how important she was to them, once she is gone. I want to be that kind of person.”

“Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?”

“Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky. ”