The Sea Only Drowns Its Lovers.

I Seldom Try To Probe The Mystery Of My Sloth. I Have Squandered A Gigantic Fortune Of Work Hours... Seems Likely That I'll Go On Squandering Till The Very End.

Do You Think It Makes People Nasty To Be Loved? You Know It Doesn’t! Then Why Should It Make Them Nice To Be Loathed? While You’re Being Persecuted, You Hate What’s Happening To You, You Hate The People Who Are Making It Happen; You’re In A World Of Hate. Why, You Wouldn’t Recognize Love If You Met It! You’d Suspect Love! You’d Think There Was Something Behind It—some Motive—some Trick.

I Certainly Should Have,' He Agrees, Smiling And Thinking What An Absurd And Universally-accepted Bit Of Nonsense It Is, That Your Best Friends Must Necessarily Be The Ones Who Best Understand You. As If There Weren't Far Too Much Understanding In The World Already; Above All, That Understanding Between Lovers, Celebrated In Song And Story, Which Is Actually Such Torture That No Two Of Them Can Bear It Without Frequent Separations Or Fights.

A Few Times In My Life I've Had Moments Of Absolute Clarity, When For A Few Brief Seconds The Silence Drowns Out The Noise And I Can Feel Rather Than Think, And Things Seem So Sharp. And The World Seems So Fresh As Though It Had All Just Come Into Existence. I Can Never Make These Moments Last. I Cling To Them, But Like Everything, They Fade. I Have Lived My Life On These Moments. They Pull Me Back To The Present, And I Realize That Everything Is Exactly The Way It Was Meant To Be.

For Other People, I Can't Speak - But, Personally, I Haven't Gotten Wise On Anything. Certainly, I've Been Through This And That; And When It Happens Again, I Say To Myself, Here It Is Again. But That Doesn't Seem To Help Me. In My Opinion, I, Personally, Have Gotten Steadily Sillier And Sillier - And That's A Fact.