“

For me, what falling in love means is different. It’s a matter of suddenly, globally, ‘knowing’ that another person represents your own access to some vitally

transmissable truth
or radiantly heightened
mode of perception,

and that if you lose the thread of this intimacy, both your soul and your whole world might subsist forever in some desert-like state of ontological impoverishment. For me the sex comes in, I guess, in an instrumental way, if it does at all. Like, it’s one possible avenue of intimacy—but if you have other good ones, like therapy, then I can never remember why somebody’d bother with sex.

”

“You have to die a few times before you can really live.”

“By uprooting himself from the world, man makes himself present to the world and makes the world present to him. I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like to be this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.”