“When real intimacy occurs, any where, any how, it comes close to feeling we live forever, and we are not alone.”

“What if true enlightenment is the peace we feel when we are no longer resisting any thought or feeling that may come to touch us regardless of whether it is positive or negative?”

“At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better”

“The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.”

“Maybe it’s because women feel they want to maintain some mystery that they’re not gross, to be more attractive or something. For me it’s all part of intimacy. That’s how I define intimacy – living closer and being more honest, closer to what your real desires are – and it’s exciting.”

“The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself.

No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset.”

“In our thinking there is no longer any spark of the uplifting flight of concepts or of the ecstasies of understanding. We are enlightened, we are apathetic. No one talks anymore of a love of wisdom. There is no longer any knowledge whose friend (philos) one could be. It does not occur to us to love the kind of knowledge we have; rather we ask ourselves how we might contrive to live with it without becoming ossified.”

“Any parting could be forever, and we don't know.”

“The terror and emotional distress come like the brunt of the waves. But that's how life sways our thoughts and feelings. We cannot expect the sea to be calm forever. We must be prepared for the hurricane to come our way.”

“And when we look closely, we find a system of morals which any civilised person today should surely find poisonous.”