Each role has its own different challenges.
If I lie down on my bed I must be here, But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.
Death's not a separation or alteration or parting; it's just a one-handled door.
It is the privilege of the rich To waste the time of the poor To water with tears in secret A tree that grows in secret That bears fruit in secret That ripened falls to the ground in secret And manures the parent tree Oh the wicked tree of hatred and the secret The sap rising and the tears falling.
This is the simplest of all thoughts, that Death must come when we call, although he is a god.
I love Death because he breaks the human pattern and frees us from pleasures too prolonged as well as from the pains of this world. It is pleasant, too, to remember that Death lies in our hands; he must come if we call him. . . . I think if there were no death, life would be more than flesh and blood could bear.
I like food, I like stripping vegetables of their skins, I like to have a slim young parsnip under my knife.
There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. . . . It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. . . . I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. . . . I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
More courage is required to forgive than is required to take up arms.
Fate is what Heaven imparts.