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

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

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.

Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.

What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.