Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

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.

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.