“Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer.  It does come.  But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide.  I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!” (28).

…

“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them” (33-34).

…

“Sex is difficult; yes.  But they are difficult things that were laid upon us; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.   …   Men have made even eating into something else: want on the one hand, excess upon the other have obscured the distinctness of this necessity, and all the deep, simple urgencies in which life renews itself have become similarly obscured.  But the individual…can remind himself that all beauty in animals and plants is a quiet enduring form of love and desire, and he can see animals, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and increasing and growing not out of physical delight, not out of physical suffering, [but] bending to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will and withstanding” (34-36).