How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year - ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge - and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery.
Many things I am experiencing I already remember.
Experience alone can give, even to the greatest talent, that confidence in having done all that could be done.
Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.
Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.
I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.
She who has never lov'd, has never liv'd.
Sometimes the heart is so heavy that we turn away from it and forget that its throbbing is the wisest message of life, a wordless message that says, 'Live, be, move, rejoice! You are alive! ' Without the heart's wise rhythm, we could not exist.