If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.
The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert’s seventh symphony. And I’ve rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.
As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.
To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence.
Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship’.
It was a Tuesday in February. Many my life’s most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?
Little girls grow up to be women, little boys grow up to be little boys.
I think it was Harry Walpole who remarked, “In this life one should try everything once except incest and country dancing.
And he, despite the gallons of free whisky on offer, was wishing himself violently elsewhere.
Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word’s full octave.
You are who you are when nobody’s watching.
The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.