My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

I was an infant when my parents died.Thye both were ornithologists. I've triedSo often to evoke them that todayI have a thousand parents. Sadly theyDissolve in their own virtues and recede,But certain words, chance words I hear or read,Such as 'bad heart' always to him refer,And 'cancer of the pancreas' to her.

The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.

It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight.