If one talks to more than four people, it is an audience; and one cannot really think or exchange thoughts with an audience.

How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.

Marriage should, I think, always be a little bit hard and new and strange. It should be breaking your shell and going into another world, and a bigger one.

Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.

I feel we are all islands - in a common sea.

And one perfect day can give clues for a more perfect life.

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.