“Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms.”

“But the most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays [in 1946] is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means. On the other hand, the surrealists erred in supposing that one can do without a medium, that in attacking the medium one does not destroy just one means for getting into the unknown. Color and space relations constitute such a means because from them can be made structures which exhibit the various patterns of reality.”

“The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”

“Life at any time can become difficult: life at any time can become easy. It all depends upon how one adjusts oneself to life.”

“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.”

“Just between you and me, have you ever been wrong? Are you divinely infallible? Are you different from the rest of us? Human nature is prone to error; the person who invented the pencil eraser knew that.”

“Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh … without destroying that moment.”

“The motive, principle, and end of the religious life is to make an absolute gift of self to God in a self-forgetting love, to end one's own life in order to make room for God's life.”

“All told, thanks to these various forms of freedom from the old-fashioned logistical dependence on one’s parents, children in Nordic countries have an easier time successfully managing the transition to adulthood. What a disaster, an American might think, that young people could end up on welfare straight out of school.”

“Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.”