There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern.

On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.