Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!

evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.

The most interesting things are always happening behind one.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved