“And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”

Source: A Confession

Source: Gathering Evidence

Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 10, “Bomanz’s Story” (p. 491)

Variant: What looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe ittake a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.
Source: Handle with Care

Variant: I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.
Source: The Sun Also Rises

Source: The Fall of the Hotel Dumort

Explaining how he came to follow the race for the discovery of the Higgs boson from the sidelines, as quoted by Ian Sample, in The god of small things, The Guardian, Saturday 17 November 2007.

Source: The Lover's Dictionary