What a wonder I was when I was young, as I learn by the stern privilege of being old: how regardlessly I stepped the rough pathways of the hillside woods, treaded hardly thinking the tumbled stairways of the steep streams, and worked unaching hard days thoughtful only of the work, the passing light, the heat, the cool water I gladly drank.

The university thought of itself as a place of freedom for thought and study and experimentation, and maybe it was, in a way. But it was an island too, a floating or a flying island. It was preparing people from the world of the past for the world of the future, and what was missing was the world of the present, where every body was living its small, short, surprising, miserable, wonderful, blessed, damaged, only life.

I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say, "Good-good-good-good-good!" like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith.

Mat felt the change upon himself. Now he was the oldest, and the longest memory was his. Now between him and the grave stood no other man. From here on he would find the way for himself.

My life, though, has been something (as only now at last I am able to see), but it is something that it has made of itself, not something that I have made of it. All I seem to have done is avoid wherever I could (so far) the man across the desk—for (so far) the world has afforded a little room for a few of us, lucky or blessed, to go around him. And now I wonder if I can die quickly enough and secretly enough to make the final evasion.

The future was coming to me, but I had not so much as lifted a foot to go to it.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

and i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was

But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again.

I give it (grandfather's watch) to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.