The Eternal Wonder

To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think.

Wandering is never waste, dear boy,' he said. 'While you wander you will find much to wonder about, and wonder is the first step to creation.

You must set forth and find the center of your interest. You are a creator, but you must find your interest and then dedicate yourself to that interest—not to the act of creativity. Merely to want to create will make it impossible for you to do so. You must find an interest greater than yourself—a love, perhaps—and then the power to create will set you on fire.

Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation.

This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night.

There was no need to hurry that future—yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what?

Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it.

Make love! He disliked the phrase. Could one make love?

Life is the wonder with which we are all infused. …

For he came to perceive that since people were his study, his teachers, the objects through which he could satisfy his persistent wonder about life itself, his own being among others, wherever he lived for the moment, there was his home.

Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge.

don’t know what to tell you,” he said slowly. “I have not had time to think much about myself. Wherever I have been—at least until now, I have been mostly alone. The others were always much bigger—much older.” He paused to consider himself in the past. “Older in years, that is,” he amended. “I’ve always been too old for myself.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “Then you have an old soul.

His problem was the eternal question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist—the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release.

He could have been lonely except that he was never lonely, since he had always been alone.

Books are a shortcut to total knowledge. You can’t learn everything by your own experience. Use experience to test what you have already learned in books—

Children do divide a woman, in an odd sort of way.

This is one of the main reasons I wished to come to America. I wished to see with my own heart if it would be different and it is not. Even here in New York, and I understand it is true of every major city in this vast and beautiful land, there is a Chinatown and a Latin quarter and an Italian section and a Negro neighborhood and blockbusters and riots and all of that as your own fearful civil war continues even one hundred years after it is supposedly over. And look again at the plight of the only real Americans, the American Indians. No, my dear, one cannot really ever know how it is to be anything unless one is indeed that thing.

The less intelligent and civilized of the human race continue to reproduce as a matter of course with either no, or at most very little, thought to the future overpopulation and resulting famine or anything else. They go on, generation after generation, reproducing merely because it is their nature to do so. The more intelligent and civilized members of human society, on the other hand, are using birth-control methods in their effort to control population growth and, so, are slowly breeding themselves out of existence or at least into what is already a serious minority.

That is what I hate most about this war game. It cuts off communication between peoples. We cannot ask questions and so we cannot get answers.

Books he would always learn from, for people, great people, put the best of themselves into books. Books were a distillation of people. But people would be his teachers, and people were not in schoolrooms. People were everywhere.