It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.

I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.

Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available.

The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.