You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.

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

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.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.