“New eyes awaken.I send Love's name into the world with wingsAnd songs grow up around me like a jungle.Choirs of all creatures sing the tunesYour Spirit played in Eden.Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradiseShine on the face of the abyssAnd I am drunk with the great wildernessOf the sixth day in Genesis.But sound is never half so fairAs when that music turns to airAnd the universe dies of excellence.Sun, moon and starsFall from their heavenly towers.Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore.Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,All fear another wind, another thunder:Then one more voiceSnuffs all their flares in one gust.And I go forth with no more wine and no more starsAnd no more buds and no more EdenAnd no more animals and no more sea:While God sings by himself in acres of nightAnd walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.”

“Generations of men are like the leaves.In winter, winds blow them down to earth,but then, when spring season comes again,the budding wood grows more. And so with men:one generation grows, another dies away.”

“There's a story... a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree... and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings... more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles.”

“On this blue day, I want to be nothing more than an amanuensis to the birds, transcribing all the bits and snatches of song riding in on the wind.”

“The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for-and dying for, if need be-is the opportunity of making someone else more happy.”

“Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more. Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never. Then sigh not so, but let them go, And be you blithe and bonny, Converting all your sounds of woe Into hey nonny, nonny. Sing no more ditties, sing no more Of dumps so dull and heavy. The fraud of men was ever so Since summer first was leafy. Then sigh not so, but let them go, And be you blithe and bonny, Converting all your sounds of woe Into hey, nonny, nonny.”