I remember a day as a child when we were driving in the rain; even at nine years old I wanted to remember the feeling of how big, and complicated, and beautiful, and dangerous the world was, this world of thunderstorms and rainbows. Safety is a child’s first desire, and, all too often, they never find it, but I felt it that day, and I remember it still.

Beauty is always about balance and harmony: of similarity and difference, of symmetry and uniqueness. We instinctively respond to beauty, almost from birth, for in it is a type of key — to happiness, to morality, and to everything that lies beyond.

Love travels; it goes where you go, for as long as you are still going, laying down beside you every night when at last you sleep.

People, on the other hand, have conflicts, commitments, and limitations, but that should never be interpreted to mean that they do not love; love is the one limitless thing there is, and its perceived limits are merely those of our imagination.

We delineate the phases of our lives by various rites of passage; however, the baby, the child, the adolescent — they are all still in there. We do not so much change our voice as become a choir of voices, and it is only by the cleverness of our arrangements that we miss how often it is really a younger version of us whose voice we are actually hearing.

For him, the fundamental duality of life was between people for whom life is stressful – who want calm – and people for whom life is boring – who want excitement.

The first group could be annoying in their constant obsession for peace and quiet; the second group’s most annoying characteristic was their tendency to kill other people.

People think it’s easy being a narcissist, but, there’s a lot more time involved than you’d think — I mean, every day, there are people’s dreams to belittle, and their pains and griefs to dismiss — meanwhile, keeping up a constant flow about just how unfair life is to me. Some of you couldn’t last five minutes having to be a real narcissist; under the pressure, you’d break down and start caring about other people in no time.

Human lives are imperfect: in fact, they are markedly so. Yet, whatever perfection there is in each, or any, of our lives, it is characterized by our adding to the world’s often meager store of truth, or goodness, or beauty; or, perhaps, just not ruining true, good or beautiful things when we happen to find them.

I’ve read that anxiety is what lingers after the actual stressful situations or circumstances have gone; however, given what modern life is, I’m having a hard time imagining when that would be. Life is unpredictably expensive, for example, and that stress hangs over us throughout all our days.