“There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time: it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is a day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can’t have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn’t be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white side-by-side with black. In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn’t, for if the world went on and on without rest forever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don’t. So because it doesn’t get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears.[…] God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there’s nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This his way of hiding form himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars.”

“Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man, let me offer you a definition - is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he’s about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.”