"Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny."

"It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great."

"We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe."

"We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds."

"A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to."

"Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time."

"Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unf ted but life-enhancing thoughts."

"Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere."

"If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful."

"Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same."

"Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control."

"As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents."

"The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort."

"The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning."

"Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person."

"We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it)."

"The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding."

"Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement."

"We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us."

"To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity."

"A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide."

"Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself."

"The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be."

"The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."

"It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day."

"Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all."

"Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food."

"Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains."

"Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money."

"Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge."

"At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality."

"In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion."

"Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are."

"It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value."

"When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches."

"Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom."

"A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily."

"Beauty is a promise of happiness."

"And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?"

"There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it."

"…it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place where we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.” (p.23)"

"It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers."

"Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet."

"Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us."

"An urgent wish is no guarantor of a sound solution."

"It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided."

"The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done."

"When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes."