The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

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

to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap

The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.

We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.

Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.

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