Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains...

Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.

Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.

The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.

The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one's sanity.

Tranquillity hides in small spaces, and when found needs to be treasured, because you know it's a phantom that will slip away again.

One of the keystones of romantic love - and also of the ecstatic religion practiced by mystics - is the powerful desire to become one with the beloved.