There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness