“All is pattern, all life, but we can’t always see the pattern when we’re part of it.”

Danger hides in beauty and beauty in danger.

… wore sorrow and anger like a worn-out coat and would not throw it away.

How helpless we are, like netted birds, when we are caught by desire!

Oh, lovely Europe, your flowers and your wine, your bread, your music.

What happens to one of the three or five or twelve will happen to them all. Whatever grief or triumph may touch any one will touch every one, as they are carried forward into the unknowable under the brilliant, terrifying sun which nourishes all.

It was unwise to plan too carefully. It took only one great failure to learn that lesson.

Separate from the other unnamed billions who walk the earth, each of these little groups of three or five or twelve, brought together by the shuffle of chance, then welded by blood, sees in itself the whole of earth, or all that matters of it.

I stand and listen to people speaking french in the stores and in the street. It’s such a pert, crisp language, elegant as ruffling taffeta.

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

You will be courteous to your elders who have explored to the point from which you may advance; and helpful to your juniors who will progress farther by reason of your labors.

All that you may achieve or discover you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern of the truth which from the separate approaches every true scholar is striving to descry.

One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.

One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.

And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.

A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.

If you stay in that new flow of positive behavior, it’s hard to revert back to old patterns. But if you do fall off, just forgive yourself, recover quickly, and get right back on.