One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

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.