What’s the most fundamental human urge?

Some suggestions for you :

She thinks how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?

Better, then, to go light on the sexual particulars, and think instead of who's winning and who's losing at any given point. How is power being exchanged here? I want to say, Who's on top? But that would of course be sleazy, and just generally beneath me...

On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?

There's no denying his resemblance to the Rodin bronze - the slender, effortless muscularity of youth, the extravagant nonchalance of it; that sense that beauty is in fact the natural human condition and not the rarest of mutations.

You have failed in the most base and human of ways--you have not imagined the lives of others.

What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.

Then the feeling moves on. It does not collapse; it is not whisked away. It simply moves on, like a train that stops at a small country station, stands for a while, and then continues out of sight.

She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.

You don't have to matter any more than you do right now.

She doesn't really want to go far, she just wants the solitude, the public solitude, of the street; the un-company of passing strangers, no one embracing her, no one looking with compassion and wonder into her eyes, no one marvelling at her.

These hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope more than anything, for more.

There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.