A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

Our whole knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self-knowledge. For knowing is a translation of external events into bodily processes, and especially into states of the nervous system and the brain: we know the world in terms of the body, and in accordance with its structure.

Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon.

I think it’s good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone.

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow fast in movies, I had the familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.

As long as we define ourselves in terms of our pain and our problems, we will never be free from them.

You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but a sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.

Some people are old at 18 and some are young at 90. Time is a concept that humans created.

And no matter what anybody says about grief and about time healing all wounds, the truth is, there are certain sorrows that never fade away until the heart stops beating and the last breath is taken.

There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words.

your little voice
               over the wires came leaping
and i felt suddenly
dizzy
     with the jostling and shouting of merry flowers
wee skipping high-heeled flames
courtesied before my eyes
                        or twinkling over to my side
looked up
with impertinently exquisite faces
floating hands were laid upon me
i was whirled and tossed into delicious dancing
up
up
with the pale important
                      stars and the humorous
                                            moon
dear girl
how i was crazy how i cried when i heard
                                            over time
and tide and death
leaping
sweetly
     your voice