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.

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

The cure for a broken heart is simple, my lady. A hot bath and a good night's sleep.

I was ever the realist, sometimes to my sorrow. But seldom to my regret.

Now I felt the long-forgotten urgency of lovemaking, when it seems one's human selves leave, to be replaced by hungry beasts bolting their food. Gone are the civilized beings who talk of manners and journeys and letters; in their places are two bodies straining to give birth to a burst of inhuman pleasure followed by a great, floating nothingness. An explosion of life followed by death - in this we live, and in this we foreshadow our own sweet deaths.

Yet we always envy others, comparing our shadows to their sunlit sides.