Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again.

I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.

A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.

The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty.