Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.

When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.

No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.