It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.

For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi - such an abherration in their workaday mendacity - that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on.

It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it.

...what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends , there's nothing left.

If everybody was so reverent of the institute of marriage, how did all the adultery get committed?

When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.

It's always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn't bad. It's a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It's just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that's inside.