It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice.

I like the relative literacy of at least some of England. I mean, I didn't come for the food or the weather!

Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it.

If you are married and you go off and have an affair with someone, if you are a husband who does that, it may potentially hurt your wife enormously. But it seems to me likely also to compromise your marriage. That seems to me to be a harm.

It's deeply humbling to realize that there is no such thing as a society with a purchase on truth.

Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn.

The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.