For God's sake,' the dog is saying, 'open the universe a little more!

The first undressing of two lovers is a most special event.

It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.

My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?

In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.

Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?