Distance is the soul of the beautiful.

There could have never been two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.

She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.

To think that we might easily have gone through life not knowing each other, missing all this free flow of love and ideas and warmth and sharing...

Yet this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now.

How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.

Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.

A great relationship ... breaches the barriers of a lofty solitude, subdues its strict law, and throws a bridge from self-being to self-being across the abyss of dread of the universe.

Talk about not knowing other people — why, when you came right down to it, you didn't even know yourself!

To be called beautiful was a novelty in his experience.

It is difficult to know yourself if you do not know others.

To be unknown but loved by just one is better than being known by many but loved by none.

Not to know certain things is a great part of wisdom.

If we have the opportunity to be generous with our hearts, ourselves, we have no idea of the depth and breadth of love's reach.