Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.

I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.

She is not fashioned for a life among strangers.

You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

To live alone one must be either a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher.

...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

Much like to the mole in Æsopes fable, that, being blynd her selfe, would in no wise be perswaded that any beast could see.

"Certainly," quoth Athelstane, "women are the least to be trusted of all animals, monks and abbots excepted."

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.

Aristotle says that in order to live alone one must either be an animal or a god. The third alternative is lacking. A man must be both; a philosopher.

I don't want to know more about her; don't want to know her weaknesses or calculate them. What I have is not for her; he gives me to understand she would not know what to do with it; it's not her fault. — One is married and there is nothing to be done. — Yet he has said to me, I would marry you if I could, meaning: I want very much to marry you. I offended him a bit by not being moved. It's other things he's said that are the text I'm living by. I really do not know if I want any form of public statement, status, code; such as marriage. There's nothing more private and personal than the life of a mistress, is there? Outwardly, no one even knows we are responsible to each other....

'This is the creature that has never been' — he told me a line of poetry about that unicorn, translated from German. A mythical creature. Un paradis inventé.

The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.