“Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.”

Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.

The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.

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.

You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.

What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.

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

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.

The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.

Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.

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

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

Birds are not free since Men have invented cages.

Bird cage is nice only when it is empty!

Those blue eyes that had stopped my heart the first time she looked at me found me in the crowd.” -Cage

You are not called to be a canary in a cage. You are called to be an eagle, and to fly sun to sun, over continents.

What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.

He opened her cages, and freed the things inside.

But are they protection or a cage? These ribs that ensnare my heart so.

The more you judge others. The more you cage yourself.