If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.