Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.

Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.

Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.

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.

Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.

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