A good half of the art of living is resilience.

A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.