The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.

"What do women want?" "They eat green salad and drink human blood."

Fun comes hard - like, alas, its prarens, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue.

I have begun in old age to understand...that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others.

To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.

Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.

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