When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

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

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

Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.

The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.