But say you do find the right people - how do you love them without smothering them?...How do you not suffocate them with all the love you've built up in their absence?

Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at the time.

I think you can love someone and be infatuated with them, too. But infatuation is immediate, while the sort of love in the West is something you build with someone. It's a trust.

Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.

Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet. It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones: The history of how you felt.

Could it be that first love was the only true love? And that after those first fires had been doused or burned out, men and women chose whom they would love based on worldly needs, and then reenacted the rituals and feelings of that first pure experience - nursed the flames that once burned of their own accord

Athens is the birthplace of modern tragedy. In the Greek tragic plays, the tableau of the characters would become a statue, like the statue of Oedipus reaching up to the Gods with blood spilling out of his eyes. I love the way the Greeks would immortalize experience. Things that all of us feel.