“If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?”

Thin Ice
Poetry

Source: Last Sacrifice

Source: 1980s, That Benediction is Where You Are (1985), p. 63
Context: Are we wasting our lives? By that word “wasting” we mean dissipating our energy in various ways, dissipating it in specialized professions. Are we wasting our whole existence, our life? If you are rich, you may say, “Yes, I have accumulated a lot of money, it has been a great pleasure.” Or if you have a certain talent, that talent is a danger to a religious life. Talent is a gift, a faculty, an aptitude in a particular direction, which is specialization. Specialization is a fragmentary process. So you must ask yourself whether you are wasting your life. You may be rich, you may have all kinds of faculties, you may be a specialist, a great scientist or a businessman, but at the end of your life has all that been a waste? All the travail, all the sorrow, all the tremendous anxiety, insecurity, the foolish illusions that man has collected, all his gods, all his saints and so on — have all that been a waste? You may have power, position, but at the end of it — what? Please, this is a serious question that you must ask yourself. Another cannot answer this question for you.

Source: Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait (2008), Chapter 23 (p. 284)

Quotes from Interviews

Quoting his mother, in [Ray, Elaine, Cory Booker encourages students to use their moral imaginations to work for good, https://news.stanford.edu/thedish/2016/02/24/cory-booker-encourages-students-to-use-their-moral-imaginations-to-work-for-good/, Stanford University, 21 August 2018, February 24, 2016], as quoted in [Ross, Janell, Six noteworthy things about Cory Booker, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/25/six-noteworthy-things-about-cory-booker/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8842f22736b9, 21 August 2018, The Washington Post, July 25, 2016]
2016

Source: The Price of Salt

Source: Twenties Girl