The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.

We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.

Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe the the beloved now that they believe in us?

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.

The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.

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

Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.