"

I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A ...more

"

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to ...more

"

The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release...more

"

But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were in...more

"

More commonly suffering breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating. You see how gruesomely human beings are destroyed by pain, when the...more

"

Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled , himself, to see it -- eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the po...more

"

Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.

"

History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend o...more

"

He was looking for the Knight of Faith, the real prodigy. That real prodigy, having set its relations with the infinite, was entirely at home in the f...more

"

And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old...more