…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born “islomanes”…are direct descendents of the Atlanteans

It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.

after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine

Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.