Must being in love always mean being in pain?

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

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.