Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.
…falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.
The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.
You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
It’s the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself.
Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.
I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.
That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
You can tell a lot from a person’s nails. When a life starts to unravel, they’re among the first to go.
We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.
He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.
Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.
For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief – how could they ever be other than what they are?
Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.
The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.
Love doesn’t grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.
This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer – a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight.
It is shaming sometimes how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.
Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?
