The trouble with fulfilling your ambitions is you think you will be transformed into some sort of archangel and you're not. You still have to wash your socks.

Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms. You blush in each other's presence, you both hover in places where you expect the other to pass, you are both a little tongue-tied, you both laugh inexplicably and too long, you become quite nauseatingly girlish, and he becomes quite ridiculously gallant. You have also grown a little stupid.

In reality the world is as full of bad mothers as it is of bad fathers, and it is not the motherless children who become delinquent but the fatherless ones.

Love is not breathlessness; It is not excitement; It is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love”, which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

It's stupid to claim that one human being is special, or picked out by God, when in fact there are hundreds of millions of human beings in the world, and God knows how many millions of people long dead who have been lost to history, all of whom were probably special to someone.

Your lips are like sugar And your cheeks an apple Your breasts are paradise And your body a lily. O, to kiss the sugar To bite the apple To reveal paradise And open the lily.

We have roots that grow towards each other underground. And when all the pretty blossom has fallen from our branches we find that we are one tree and not two.