Source: My Several Worlds (1954), p. 218
Context: There is something to be said for losing one’s possessions, after nothing can be done about it. I had loved my Nanking home and the little treasures it had contained, the lovely garden I had made, my life with friends and students. Well, that was over. I had nothing at all now except the old clothes I stood in. I should have felt sad, and I was quite shocked to realize that I did not feel sad at all. On the contrary, I had a lively sense of adventure merely at being alive and free, even of possessions. No one expected anything of me. I had no obligations, no duties, no tasks. I was nothing but a refugee, someone totally different from the busy young woman I had been. I did not even care that the manuscript of my novel was lost. Since everything else was gone, why not that?
Il y a une chose plus triste à perdre que la vie, c’est la raison de vivre,
Plus triste que de perdre ses biens, c’est de perdre son espérance.
L'otage (Paris: Édition de la Nouvelle revue française, 1911) p. 162; Pierre Chavannes (trans.) The Hostage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917) p. 130.
“But if nothing does as well as something about which nothing can be said, it vanishes.”
Source: Think (1999), Chapter Five, God, p. 173
“The Day Before the Revolution” p. 270 (originally published in Galaxy, August 1974)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)
2022, June 2022, Remarks on Gun Violence in America
"The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz" II. King Log.
Poetry
or him
Source: Eat and Run (2012), Ch. 11, pp. 100-101
Quoted in "New Invasion Fear In Italy Reported" - "New York Times" article - June 3, 1943.
