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

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.

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

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.