as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.

The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.

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

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.

Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.

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.