The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.

Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.

He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.

This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion.

Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?