“Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.”

“Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift…that’s nausea.”

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”

“I unpetalled you, like a rose,to see your soul,and I didn't see it. But everything around-horizons of land and of seas-,everything, out to the infinite,was filled with a fragrance,enormous and alive.”

“I always feel most alive when everything else is dying all around me”

“...I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.”