Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.

A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.

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

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.