Quotations
"Land! An island! We devoured it greedily with our eyes and woke the others, who tumbled out drowsily and stared in all directions as if they thought our bow was about to run on to a beach. Screaming seabirds formed a bridge across the sky in the direction of the distant island, which stood out sharper against the horizon as the red background widened and turned gold with the approach of the sun and the full daylight."
"When you get caught by the rain, when you realize there's no hope of reaching the car, you just surrender as the rain drenches you. You surrender as it soaks you to your core. You relish the feeling of the deep surprise, of the dim sense of seeds breaking open somewhere in the dark. You feel like dancing in the rain with the thirsty earth.
Eventually you have to reach the car and dry off, but oh, the wet laughter of the meantime!"
"By 'coming to terms with life' I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it."
"Ought we not, from time to time, open ourselves up to cosmic sadness? Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears his grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate. But if you do not clear a decent shelter for your sorrow, and instead reserve most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge-from which new sorrows will be born for others-then sorrow will never cease in this world and will multiply."