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Survival is worthless without meaning.

This was not a time of civility or compassion, but of survival.

I learned I couldn’t shed light on love other than to feel its comings and goings and be grateful.

I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.

When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.

Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls.

Life is not meant to be easy, my child but take courage: it can be delightful.

Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.

Everything is filled with stories, an old woman neighbour told me once, the same old woman neighbour, as it happens, who taught me to sew. This is when I was extremely little, too little to understand that most things don’t mean exactly what they seem, that meaning is a flighty thing. Because of what she said, I split the seam down the back of my favourite teddy, Mr Buddy, with a serrated kitchen knife. I was searching for stories, commanding words to tumble out and configure into horizontal lines like the ones inside my story books. Instead I found Mr Buddy was all stuffed with minute clouds.

: When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth: Yes; and take all the fun out of it.

In truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true: what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him.

On the morning of my thirty-fifth birthday, I woke up to an newspaper article entitled 'Mass extinction of species is happening in Ireland'. The article stated that a third of the species groups examined are threatened with extinction, predominantly due to , , and . A number of species are, in fact, '', and without urgent action being taken immediately, they will simply disappear entirely from this island. That morning, I spent so many hours researching what we have already lost — what we risk losing any day — that I nearly wept with the sadness of it all. Some of those creatures in most danger are the , the , the , the bumblebee, the , the and the .