“The most introspective of hearts tends to be the most sentimental. We cling to the smallest moments from our past because we fear that emotion will never come our way again.”
“ The past is our only real possession in life. It is the one piece of property of which time cannot deprive us; it is our own in a way that nothing else in life is. In a word, we are our past; we do not cling to it, it clings to us. ”
“Our way–the Western Way–has always been a "work in progress." Questions of life and death, good and evil, justice and tragedy–these are never definitively settled, but must be addressed again and again as personal and public worlds shift and change. We hold our morals to be absolutes, but the context of our actions and decisions is forever changing. We are not relativists because we seek to re-evaluate again and again our most crucial moral positions.”
“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.”
“Again, was it not this same presentiment of death that made it seem so strange to me now that I should never again walk along this path in the Philippine forest? In our own country, even in the most distant or inaccessible part, this feeling of strangeness never comes to us, because subconsciously we know that there is always a possibility of our returning there in the future. Does not our entire life-feeling depend upon this inherent assumption that we can repeat indefinitely what we are doing at the moment?”
“Most of the times, we feel more enjoyment from just recalling good memories of the past rather from those moments we lived,not because we did not have a good time but because realization has come late.”