We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.

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

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

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

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.

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