Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.

It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

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

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.

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.