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.

He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity - suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.

Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

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