Religions understand this: they know that to sustain goodness, it helps to have an audience. The faiths hence provide us with a gallery of witnesses at the ceremonial beginnings of our marriages and t...
Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn’t enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin’s assessme...
Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.
Q: Did he think that love could last forever? A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn’t lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship...
Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead....
Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful...
Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and our weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are f...
Our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to t...
News organizations are coy about admitting that what they present us with each day are minuscule extracts of narratives whose true shape and logic can generally only emerge from a perspective of month...
Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again, but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time; not when they have every opportunity to run a...
Living is something of an emergency anyway, but our struggles must usually be strenuously concealed. Our anxieties churn away within us, yet on the outside we must smile and deliver upbeat answers to...
I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.
He entertains a confused wish to help her, without, however, understanding that help can be a challenging gift to deliver to those who are most in need of it.
Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a little plant?
Cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.
چهبسا حقیقت این است که تا، کسی ندیده باشدمان، وجود نداریم، نمیتوانیم درست حرف بزنیم، تا وقتی کسی به حرفمان گوش بدهد، و در یک کلام، کاملاً زنده نیستیم، تا زمانی که دوست داشته بشویم.
كان فعل الكتابة مدفوعًا بخيبة الأمل من المحيطين به، ولكنها كانت ممزوجة - مع ذلك - بالأمل بشأن أن يكون ثمة شخص آخر في مكان ما سيفهمه؛ كان كتابه موجهًا إلى الجميع وغير موجه إلى أحد بالتحديد. كان مدركًا...
با توجه به پیشرفت علم، برای انسان مدرن دیگر توان اعتقاد به خدا وجود نخواهد داشت. درنتیجه دین و ایمان بازیچهای میشود در دست افراطیها و کسانی که در مراحل پایانی زجر و درد از بیماری علاج ناپذیر قرار د...
Think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible...