The divorced person is like a man with a black patch over one eye: he looks rather dashing but the fact is that he has been through a maiming experience.

Affection may be abiding and love may be abiding, but the state of being in love is transitory.

If a man has a sense of identity that does not depend on being shored up by someone else, it cannot be eroded by someone else. If a woman has a sense of identity that does not depend on finding that identity in someone else, she cannot lose her identity in someone else. And so we return to the central fact: it is necessary to be.

cookbooks, I found, are intended for people with time to cook - and, surprisingly often, for people who already know how to cook.

We find what we expect to find. We do not see the world as it is but as we are.

Self-affirmation cannot be found in love; it is a prior condition of genuine love.

Examining love is like examining a stocking: if you hold it up to the light and stretch it to search for snags, any snags there are may well run and ruin the stocking. In fact, if I may fashion Coudert's law from Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy, it is this: Love is not only changed by observation; it is changed for the worse.