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...
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers.
In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.
How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right – in the sense of seeming somehow excessively...
How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships – if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion...
Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
Every year, humanity produces some 30,000 films, 2 million books and 100,000 albums, and 95 million people visit a museum or art gallery.
Adulthood involves learning to conclusively bury a great many of our hopes.
A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. In its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor's complexity and...
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...
The greater part of our anxieties stems from an exaggerated sense of the importance of our own projects and concerns. We are tortured by our ideals and by a punishingly high-minded sense of the gravit...
We take this idea of love with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will...
We might imagine that the fear and insecurity of getting close to someone would happen only once, at the start of a relationship, and that anxieties couldn’t possibly continue after two people had mad...
We learn, too, that being another’s servant is not humiliating, quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures...
We incline towards feelings of isolation and persecution because we have an unrealistic sense of how much difficulty is normal. We panic too easily, as we misjudge the meaning of our troubles. We are...
We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it’s patronizing to be thought of as you...