From your silken hair to your delicate feet you are perfection to me. Pleasure hides love from us, but pain reveals it in its essence.

out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star, there is pain

Looking around his hotel room not long before expiring: This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go.

it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be.

But you will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of ours. Of course he does. I, of all men, am not going to deny that. But remember that there has never been an artistic age, or an artistic people since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an exquisite exception.

I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists.

The experience of missing a loved one is a small clue that we were made for eternity. Dallas would be the first to insist that the overarching point of his life was not his presence, but rather, like the intentionality of thoughts itself, the grand and beautiful realities he was pointing to. It's all there, if we have eyes to see, ears to hear, minds to think and hearts to feel. The rest is the adventure of our lives.

The reason we don't want to feel is that feeling exposes the tragedy of our world and the darkness of our hearts.

Tension is living in the gap between certainty and uncertainty. We always begin with what we know, and are irresistibly drawn to what we don't know. We are inveterately curious. We are wired to grow, and all growth stretches us beyond our comfort level. Comfort is the absence of tension; growth requires a swim in murky, dangerous waters... Tension is the medium which we breathe everyday.

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.

Fullness to such a burden is That go on pilgrimage; Here little, and hereafter bliss, Is best from age to age.

In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It was the light that shines in darkness calling me back into time.