Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!

She saw through the shell of me into the center of me

I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.

...the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.

I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.

And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.