That’s the first thing that strikes anAmerican woman about Europe – that it’s unsanitary. Impossible forthem to conceive of a paradise without modern plumbing. If theyfind a bedbug they want to write a letter immediately to thechamber of commerce.

The world is always dying and always coming back to life. Tide and pulse, and with the turn of the tide a touch of mystery.

The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.

Ik kwam er achter dat ik er mijn hele leven heus niet naar had verlang om te leven - als wat anderen doen tenminste leven genoemd kan worden - maar wel om mezelf te kunnen uitdrukken.

One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.

The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment.

Strange as it may seem today to say, the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.

Certainly paradise, whatever, wherever it be, contains flaws. (Paradisical flaws, if you like.) If it did not, it would be incapable of drawing the hearts of men or angels.

By choosing to live above the ordinary level we create extraordinary problems for ourselves.