The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.

You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.

As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.