I've got an adjective that just fits you.

I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to 'succeed'-and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal-then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.

Egyptian Proverb: The worst things: To be in bed and sleep not, To want for one who comes not, To try to please and please not.

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something-an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.