Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

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.

What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.