We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.

To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.