“Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think.”

“You are going to have to struggle with something that you have never struggled with before. I am talking to you about it now. I am talking to you about the fact that your whole life to date has been in an effort to control what you see as being finite. The whole of life for human beings, predicated on the idea that one must acquire power in order to overpower conditions that will not give them what they say they need in order to have a fixed sense of security and well-being.”

“The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.”

“Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures… And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me”

“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”

“I could never be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.”

“So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.”

“Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come.”

“I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.”

“A man should also take heart that life is like a revolving wheel, and in the end he or his son or his son's son may be reduced to taking tzedaka. He should not think, therefore, "How shall I diminish my property in order to give to the poor." Instead, he should realize that his property is not his own, but only deposited with him in trust to do with as the Depositor (God) wishes.”