Things you believe are baggage in your life.
I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.
I had build up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth.
Every moment was a precious thing, having in it the essence of finality.
Sometimes it’s a sort of indulgence to think the worst of ourselves. We say, ‘Now I have reached the bottom of the pit, now I can fall no further,’ and it is almost a pleasure to wallow in the darkness. The trouble is, it’s not true. There is no end to the evil in ourselves, just as there is no end to the good. It’s a matter of choice. We struggle to climb, or we struggle to fall. The thing is to discover which way we’re going.
He was like someone sleeping who woke suddenly and found the world. . . all the beauty of it, and the sadness too. The hunger and the thirst. Everything he had never thought about or known was there before him, and magnified into one person who by chance, or fate--call it what you will--happened to be me.
The urge to climb will never be explained. In olden days, perhaps it was a wish to reach the stars. Today, anyone so minded can buy a seat on a plane and feel himself master of the skies. Even so, he will not have rock under his feet, or air upon his face; nor will he know the silence that comes only on the hills.
Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.
The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future--though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.
When a woman who is sexual takes off her top, it plays into something.
A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.