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

There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

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

The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.