Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.

my love of water ... is mingled with and almost indistinguishable from a fear of water (I can float in a vertical position - I enter a fugue state - but I cannot bear to bury my face in water).

Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.

Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.

To surrender one's vulnerable body to water has always seemed to me a limpid act of will that has no coutnerpart or equal, unless it is sex.

Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.