Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions..

It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to wh….

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

Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle..

What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others..

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

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as t….

It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the ….

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition..

Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence..

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us..

We should not be frightened by appearances..

It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wan….

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone..

Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, "Don't you worry about being called names?" retorted, "Why? Do you think I shoul….

I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there..

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I wa….

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out..

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

There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being rem….

Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance..