One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.

Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.

Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.