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

Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.