The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.

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.

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.

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.