We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

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 pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.

The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.