To love is to think.And I almost forget to feel only from thinking about her.I don’t know what I want at all, even from her, and I don’t think about anything but her.I have a great animated distraction.When I want to meet her,I almost feel like not meeting her,So I don’t have to leave her afterwards.And I prefer thinking about her, because it’s like I’m afraid of her.I don’t know what I want at all, and I don’t want to know what I want. All I want to do is think about her.I’m asking nothing of nobody, not even her, except to think.

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

In starlit nights I saw you,So cruelly you kissed me.Your lips a magic world,Your sky all hung with jewels.The killing moonWill come too soon.

In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.

There may be hostility and ambivalence, there may even be no responses and those are the worst because it means people do not care. Yet all of these are part of the parcel of land that we call human experience and spirituality. The deep lows and pinnacled heights as well as the wonderful things in what one priest called the lowlands of mundania. This book is not for you if you are looking for hatred on atheists, religionists or just looking for reasons to justify yourself.

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

The mental mist of ambiguity and the fog of ambivalence hamper human existence.

A pensive personality and ambivalent attitude towards power and money can cause other people to take a high production or creative person for granted.

In starlit nights I saw you,So cruelly you kissed me.Your lips a magic world,Your sky all hung with jewels.The killing moonWill come too

Dad scowls. "Phen." He says the name like it's a swear word. "Disgusting, cowardly creatures, the ambivalent. Worse than the fallen, in many ways." His eyes are so fierce it's a tad scary. "They have no conviction at all.

The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.

He had to pause for his usual misgivings.

Don Bradman will bat no more against England, and two contrary feelings dispute within us: relief, that our bowlers will no longer be oppressed by this phenomenon; regret, that a miracle has been removed from among us. So must ancient Italy have felt when she heard of the death of Hannibal.

What am I doing? Tearing myself. My usual occupation at most times.

Author says he suffered from both "a craving to be famous" and "a horror of being known to like being known.

I slide to my knees and say, "Please let this be over." Then, I'm not ready for it to be over.

There she was, the mother of me, like a lit plinth,Heavenly, though I was reared to find this kind Of visitation impractical; she was an unbearable detailOf the supreme celestial map,Of which I had been taught that there wasNo such thing.