For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?

It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.

Time spent with poets is never wasted.

I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won't boil over!

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.