I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing old age that it is a time of discovery. If they say "Of what?" I can only answer "We must find out for ourselves, otherwise it wouldn't be discovery."

I grow more intense as I age.

Making those we love happy sounds innocent as a dove, but it can be as destructive as a lion.

Another secret we carry is that though drab outside - wreckage to the eye, mirrors a mortification - inside we flame with a wild life that is almost incommunicable.

I wonder why love is so often equated with joy when it is everything else as well. Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving excessive value, and losing it again. It is recognition, often of what you are not but might be. It sears and it heals. It is beyond pity and above law. It can seem like truth.

What fun it is to generalize in the privacy of a note book. It is as I imagine waltzing on ice might be. A great delicious sweep in one direction, taking you your full strength, and then with no trouble at all, an equally delicious sweep in the opposite direction. My note book does not help me think, but it eases my crabbed heart.

One hardly dares to say that love is the core of the relationship, though love is sought for and created in relationship; love is rather the marvel when it is there, but it is not always there, and to know another and to be known by another - that is everything.