It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.

Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.

Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.

Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.

It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.