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

We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.

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.

It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.