When illness enters a home, not only does it take hold of a body. It also weaves a dark web between hearts, a web where hope is trapped.

Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn - and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.

The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you.

Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.

Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.

. . . maybe that's what life's all about: there's a lof of despair, but also the odd moments of beauty, where time is no longer the same . . . [like] something suspended . . . an elsewhere . . . an always within a never. Yes, that's is, an always within a never.

To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things.