The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.

When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.