Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.