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.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

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 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.

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.