The world has been forced to its knees. Unhappily, we seldom find our way there without being beaten to it by suffering.

I am beginning to respect the apathetic days. Perhaps they're a necessary pause: better to give in to them than to fight them at your desk hopelessly; then you lose both the day and your self-respect. Treat them as physical phenomena -- casually -- and obey them.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

It is only framed in space that beauty blooms; only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant and therefore beautiful.

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

We walk up the beach under the stars. And when we are tired of walking, we lie flat on the sand under a bowl of stars. We feel stretched, expanded to take in their compass. They pour into us until we are filled with stars, up to the brim.

This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy - even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.