Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.