“I take a sun bath and listen to the hours, formulating, and disintegrating under the pines, and smell the resiny hardihood of the high noon hours. The world is lost in a blue haze of distances, and the immediate sleeps in a thin and finite sun.”

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.

I suppose all we can really share with people is a taste for the same kinds of weather.

Nobody has ever been able to experience what they have thoroughly understood – or understand what they have experienced until they have achieved a detachment that renders them incapable of repeating the experience.

Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure another chance in life.

I am really only myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.

I don’t want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally.

Without you, dearest dearest I couldn’t see or hear or feel or think – or live – I love you so and I’m never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night.

People are like almanacs, Bonnie – you never can find the information you’re looking for, but the casual reading is well worth the trouble.

I love you, even if there isn’t any me, or any love, or even any life. I love you.

Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace?

We get something to do and as soon as we’ve got it, it gets us.

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising.

Oh, we are going to be so happy away from all the things that almost got us but couldn’t quite because we were too smart for them!

Death is the only real elegance.

Nothing could have survived our life.

Being in love, she concluded, is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone.

It is easy to sympathize at a distance,’ said an old gentleman with a beard. ‘I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.

Under all conditions, well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

I’m exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator

I’ve always been hopeful about Scotland’s prospects. And I now believe more than ever that Scotland is within touching distance of achieving independence and equality.

Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‘escape of energy,’ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Now I know being close to you was never about the proximity.