The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

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.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?