It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.