The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.

The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.

.. if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.

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.