Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
I like working with people. I believe change can only come through collaboration.
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them fully developed in someone else.
True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
The modern world thinks of art as very important: something close to the meaning of life.
Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
I keep a picture of my beloved children close by. Also, water and plenty of pads and pens.
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone.
Small issues are really just large ones that haven't been accorded the requisite attention.
One of the most welcome aspects of office work is that you do not need to be fully yourself.
My theory is that many of the things that move us are things we long for but find hard to do.
Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
Among adults, we can admit that of course, characters are creations. They aren't real people.
There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
Some of the reason why we marry the wrong people is that we don't really understand ourselves.
Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.