There is so much in so many of the books I’ve read that I feel like a parent with many children trying to say something that I’m sure will make them feel loved equally. I have already given my embrace to the thousands of quotations I have selected to open my column for the past 40 years.

I like E. L. Doctorow on writing: "It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights. But you can make the whole trip that way." This seems to me would apply to any long-term chore.

Or Raymond Chandler: "Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder."  

Or William Faulkner: "We will be judged on the splendor of our failures."

Or Emily Dickinson: "The pedigree of honey dost not concern the bee; A clover, anytime, to him is aristocracy."

And then I have loved an anonymous limerick:

"There once was a man from St. Paul, who went to a fancy dressed ball. He said, ‘Yes, I’ll risk it. I’ll go as a biscuit.’ And a dog ate him up in the hall."

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

There are many lines and passages from poems that rattle around in my brain. One of my favorites is from a poem written by Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick:

"You were in your 20s and I, once, hand on glass and heart in mouth, outdrank the Rahvs in the heat of Greenwich Village, too boiled and shy and poker faced to make a pass." And another, Dylan Thomas’s: "Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light."

I was an impossibly romantic 16-year-old (wishing I were going on 30) in boarding school, already tragically mourning lost loves when I discovered Leonard Cohen, whose photograph I had plastered to the dorm room ceiling above my bed. I still love his poem "Travel," and hear its lines in my head. "Loving you, flesh to flesh to flesh, I often thought of travelling penniless to some mud throne Where a master might instruct me how to plot My life away from pain, to love alone In the bruiseless embrace of stone and lake. Lost in the fields of your hair I was never lost Enough to lose a way I had to take … Now I know why many men have stopped and wept Halfway between the loves they leave and seek, And wondered if travel leads them anywhere – Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek, The windy sky’s a locket for your hair."

Then, of course, I was wishing someone was feeling that about me. Now I am old enough to have experienced the words from both sides. I am also happy to say that Leonard is still with us, still a hopeless romantic and I still have his picture (though no longer on my ceiling). Right now, I have James Taylor’s new version of Cohen’s "Suzanne" in the CD player in my car (I so love what Taylor does with those lyrics – just listen to him sing the word "China" as in tea – he’s just amazing) and now that I’ve gotten Cohen’s "Selected Poems" off my shelf to answer this post, I am walking down memory lane: Ah, "the mortal ring of flesh on flesh in dark."