He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity - suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.

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.

An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

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