Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.

Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.