We tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. ... Religions go, "Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it." That's what all religions tell us: "Get on your knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day." Otherwise our minds are like sieves.

The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.