You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the child of a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better than average marriage yourself – either through some genetic inheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But it doesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need the opposite example – to see mistakes in order not to make them yourself. Except this would mean that the best way for parents to ensure their children have happy marriages would be to have unhappy ones themselves. So what’s the answer?

This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.

One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.

Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.

Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.