Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we're reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can't even talk or think about it directly.

Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.

Writer's block is a luxury most people with deadlines don't have.

What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.

Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?

When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn't matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly.

Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.