So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.

Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine - that is, activity - which could solve it, is seen as odious.

Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass--the earth--into the second--eternity.

Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss.

When he comes into a room, you give a little gasp, deep inside, far inside,' someone once said when trying to describe what it meant to love.

The strong look for more strength, the weak for excuses.

We are always tortured by our memory of the last time we were with anyone, what we said, what we did not say.