You can not make someone love you. You can not be thin enough or white enough or famous enough. The choice is entirely the other person's. Then again, you might try hypnosis.

We like to look for patterns and find connections in unrelated events. This way we can explain them to ourselves. Life seems neater, or at least less messy. We need to feel we are in control: it is integral to our self-esteem. We also know, though we deny it, that we are not in control. So we settle for the illusions of control. What if we stopped fooling ourselves?

Life is a series of random collisions.

If you are honest with yourself, your life will be so much more pleasant.

What does not kill you will make you stronger and more cynical.

Screw us once, shame on them; screw us twice, shame on us.

Once you’ve read too many trashy best-sellers, you begin to look for something with substance, something that attempts to define the universe.