“Not everyone is worth listening to.”

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

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

After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.

Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

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.

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.

Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.

The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.

Everyone reaches their point in time where either they die or they get sick of doing drugs.

No child wants to fail. Everyone wants to succeed.

The label’s going great, because we’re not idiots. We’re not trying to sue everyone that downloads everything.

But God told me that He/She/It had actually chosen Al Gore by making sure that Gore won the popular vote and, God thought, the Electoral College. ‘That worked for everyone else,’ God said.

The secret of how to live without resentment or embarrassment in a world in which I was different from everyone else. was to be indifferent to that difference.

the freedom to live a life free of fear of violence, to select a fulfilling career and be compensated fairly, to choose when to start a family, to marry whom you love.

In my family, there were Kei and Minoru and then there were the rest. Everyone in my family is very opinionated and everyone tried to join the debate. But by the time my turn came, there was nothing left to say.