There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language.

When you're young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it's barely the beginning.

It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.

The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning.

Those who were on the inside, the majority that is, for them it had been hard to get his point, mostly they were just pleased that they were on the inside, that they were the fittest. For those on the outside, the fear and abandonment amounts to almost everything; everybody knows that. Understanding is something one does best when one is on the borderline.

Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.

I don't fall in love anymore. Just like I don't get the mumps.