We are most alive when we're in love.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.

Without rain, there would be no life.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.