“we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously”

“works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.”

“The world is not divided up into bits and classified for those from four to six, from six to eight, from eight to twelve and so on through our three score and ten years, with a special bit for octogenarians, but the same world for all of us, undivided, its riches spread out for us to choose from according to our ages in spirit rather than our ages in years”

“If we are all alive ten years hence, let's meet, and see how many of us have got our wishes, or how much nearer we are then than now.”

“Gerat will be our astonishment in that day, and we shall then realize that it is not our works which remain, but the work which God has wrought through us in his good time without any effort of will and intention on our part. Once again we simply are to look away from ourselves to him who has himself accomplished all things for us and to follow him.”

“How many years have slipped through our hands?
At least as many as the constellations we still can identify.
The quarter moon, like a light skiff,
                                                         floats out of the mist-remnants
Of last night’s hard rain.
It, too, will slip through our fingers
                                                        with no ripple, without us in it.”