It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.

Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.