Animals are like humans, only more openly carnal and sexual, more openly and therefore more disarmingly absurd.

I feel a reassuring oneness with other people when I find that even my most intimate, anguished, socially inadmissible emotions and desires are known to others.... Kindred souls—indeed, my selves otherwise costumed—turn up in books in the most unexpected places. Discovering them is one of the great rewards of a liberal education. If I quote liberally, it is not to show off book learning, which at my stage of life can only invite ridicule, but rather to bathe in this kinship of strangers.

A great city may be seen as the construction of words as well as stone.

Animals are like humans, only more openly carnal and sexual, more openly and therefore more disarmingly absurd.

In a sense, every human construction, whether mental or material, is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists in constant chaos. Thus children's fairy tales as well as adult's legends, cosmological myths, and indeed philosophical systems are shelters built by the mind in which human beings can rest, at least temporarily, from the siege of inchoate experience and of doubt.

It is by thoughtful reflection that the elusive moments of the past draw near to us in present reality and gain a measure of permanence.

Lucidity, I maintain, is almost always desirable.