To live with the terrible truths about ourselves is the only way of not living them out. A need denied has infinitely more power than a need accepted.

It is one of those quirks of human nature that you love the person whom you treat well, not necessarily the person who treats you well.

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

At what age should one marry? As a rule of thumb, perhaps not until you are past the age of feeling strongly that you must marry.

Many people, if they were to treat other people as they treat their spouses, would soon have not a friend in the world. Why it is assumed that marriage is more impervious to the effects of discourtesy than friendship, I do not know.

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.

The more deeply the path is etched, the more it is used, and the more it is used, the more deeply it etched.