‘We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.’

a spark leaping back and forth from one to the other becoming more intense every moment, love building up like voltage in a coil.

I suspected that all the yearnings for I knew not what that I had ever felt—when autumn leaves were burning in the twilight, when wild geese flew crying overhead, when I looked up at bare branches against the stars, when spring arrived on an April morning—were in truth yearnings for him. For God.

this sudden inexplicable joy, and this intolerable pain.

The future dream charms us because of its timelessness; and I think most of the charm we see in the ‘good old days’ is no less an illusion of

And yet, after all, the clock is not always ticking. Sometimes it stops and then we are happiest. Sometimes — more precisely, some-not-times —we find ‘the still point of the turning world’. All our most lovely moments perhaps are timeless.

Goodness and love are as real as their terrible opposites, and, in truth, far more real, though I say this mindful of the enormous evils like Nazi Germany. But love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom.

Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed at it—how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren’t adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion,

principle of courtesy: whatever one of us asked the other to do -it was assumed the asker would weigh all consequences—