Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

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