The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

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

Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

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

Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.