Passing passages

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. ~ 1984 (George Orwell)

Why then, O browling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness, serious vanity, misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, still-weaking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this. Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet (I,1)

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. ~ John W. Tukey, 1962