“There is little difference between expecting misfortune and undergoing it; except that grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what we know has happened; but we fear all that possibly may happen.”

“Dawn meet the light,
and the twillight the moon
all are mirages
on labyrinth of mind,
ever since time waking.
Do you think that our existence
makes any difference
to this vast universe?
Did we just happen
or were we meant to happen?
In the universal scheme of things,
we stand nowhere.
We may manage to survive in it,
but we have no control upon it,
except in the little space and time
that we create for ourselves.
We are little possibilities
in the endless probabilities of the universe.”

“We can never possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.”

“The binding power of custom is its security of expectations. What has happened before may be expected to happen again, and he who arbitrarily disappoints expectations must be restrained or punished.”

“To us there has come a time, in the midst of swift happenings, to pause for a moment and take stock — to recall what our place in history has been, and to rediscover what we are and what we may be. If we do not, we risk the real peril of inaction.”

“We never know what God has up His sleeve. You never know what might happen; you only know what you have to do now.”

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

“We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.”

“The erasure of a human subspecies is largely painless — to us — if we know little enough about it. A dead Chinaman is of little import to us whose awareness of things Chinese is bounded by an occasional dish of chow mein. We grieve only for what we know. The erasure of Silphium from western Dane County is no cause for grief if one knows it only as a name in a botany book.”

“But it's also true that the person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing. All we know about the future is that it will be different. But perhaps what we fear is that it will be the same. So we must celebrate the changes.”