The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.
At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.
Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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