We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.

We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.