Quotations

When my parents passed on, and we read their wills, we discovered something we didn't at all expect, especially from our devoutly Catholic mother: they had both left instructions that their bodies be donated to science.

Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise.

And who by fire, who by water,
who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
who in your merry merry month of may,
who by very slow decay,
and who shall I say is calling?

But most of all as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a

I've often thought that had I been compelled to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but gaze up at the patch of sky just overhead, I'd have got used to it by degrees.

I have never been really able to believe that human affairs were serious matters. I had no idea where the serious might lie, except that it was not in all this I saw around me - which seemed to me merely an amusing game, or tiresome.

Think! Demographers estimate that at least half of all the human beings ever born are alive now, in this century. What a moment for the human soul!

A black crow
Has settled himself
On a leafless tree,
Fall of an autumn day.

At midnight
Under the bright moon,
A secret worm
Digs into a chestnut.

On a snowy morning,

I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all. It stretches on forever like an ocean of time.

"Every day for the rest of your lives, all your living moments are to be spent making others aware of this need - the need to probe and drill and examine and locate the words that take us to beyond ourselves.