“A wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night.”

He means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.

For me, I say no, but then I am old, and life, with his sunshine, his fair places, his song of birds, his music and his love, lie far behind. You others are young. Some have seen sorrow, but there are fair days yet in store. What say you?

Truly there is no such thing as finality.

The Stars are a long way off, and their words get somewhat dulled in the message.

I could not resist the temptation of mystifying him a bit, I suppose it is some taste of the original apple that remains still in our mouths.

It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import.

I do not, as you know, take sufficient interest in dress to be able to describe the new fashions. Dress is a bore.

As yet we know nothing of what goes to create or evoke the active spark of life.

No man knows till he experiences it, what it is like to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the woman he loves.

Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.

Sleep has no place it can call its own.

Doctor, you don’t know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don’t; you couldn’t with eyebrows like yours.

The angels of the dark, restoring sight; We go — the pains of Day to soothe, console — Awake, arise! Behold thou art made whole.

The blood is life… and it shall be mine!

I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.

I began writing early – very, very early… I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, ‘Now I’m a writer.’ I’ve always been a writer.

And so we remained till the red of the dawn began to fall through the snow gloom. I was desolate and afraid, and full of woe and terror. But when that beautiful sun began to climb the horizon life was to me again.

When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

Then they begin to see through their language that the problems described there are the same as the problems they are having. They can identify with characters from another language group.

This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

It’s all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow.