Healthy parakeets have the nervous energy of tennis players.

A doctor recently described to me "benign positional vertigo": it means you get dizzy in certain positions, but you can get over it without necessarily changing the position. Change "vertigo" to "anxiety," and you've summed up the neurotic's plight.

The neurotic feels as though trapped in a gas-filled room where at any moment someone, probably himself, will strike a match.

Humiliation is a vast country of imprecise boundaries. If you think you're there, you are. The neurotic rule: when in doubt, go ahead and feel humiliated.

The poor have the same basic pleasures as the rich, and the rich will always resent it.

We sometimes feel that we have been really understood, but it was always long ago, by someone now dead.

A love that lasts for twenty years may be better than love, but it isn't love.