Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love – and to put its trust in life.
By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.
Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of inextinguishable regrets.
My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.
Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
I remembered the old doctor, – It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot. I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.
I don’t think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time—
Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.