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

The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

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

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.