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.

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.

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.