“Look into my eyes, and you will see me there--all, all that is in my heart.' 'Oh, I know what I should see there!'...'What would you see? Tell me?' 'There is a little black ball in the middle of your eye; I should see myself in it no bigger than that,' and she marked off about an eighth of her little finger-nail. 'There is a pool in the wood, and I look down and see myself there. That is better. Just as large as I am--not small and black like a small, small fly.”

“My unhappiness was something deep inside me, and when i closed my eyes i could even see it. it sat somehwere - maybe in my belly, maybe in my heart; i could not exactly tell - and it took the shape of a small black ball, all wrapped up in cobwebs. i would look at it and look at it until i had burned the cobwebs away, and then i would see that the ball was no bigger than a thimble, even though it weighed worlds. at that moment, just when i saw its size and felt its weight, i was beyond feeling sorry for myself, which is to say i was beyond tears. i could only just sit and look at myself, feeling like the oldest person who had ever lived and who had not learned a single thing.”

“Seeing her this last time, I threw myself on her body. And she opened her eyes slowly. I was not scared. I knew she could see me and what she had finally done. So i shut her eyes with my fingers and told her with my heart: I cah see the truth, too. I am strong, too.”

“But you know, there's one simple thing I see absolutely clearly, now that I am so very old.I looked at her. The Albert Einstein hairstyle, and the bright black eyes and the sharp nose. That pallor on her face.She put her small hand on mine.The world is wonderful, she said. All its little things. It is wonderful.”

“When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there … now instead of then.”

“Study me as much as you like, you will not know me, for I differ in a hundred ways from what you see me to be. Put yourself behind my eyes and see me as I see myself, for I have chosen to dwell in a place you cannot see.”