“Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.”

Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

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

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 what I had at one time held so dear.

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.

The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.

A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.

The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.

I feel like I’m nothing without wildlife. They are the stars. I feel awkward without them.

There are moments when, like all of us, you get a bit self-conscious and you’d rather not be living any of your day in public. Those are the awkward times, but you’ve got to have fun with it.

The surest way to become Tense, Awkward, and Confused is to develop a mind that tries too hard – one that thinks too much.

But then she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive – a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breast and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body

Latin! The language of God! Or perhaps He speaks Hebrew? I suppose that’s more likely and it will make things rather awkward in heaven, won’t it? Will we all have to learn Hebrew?

I wanted to take the audience on a journey where that transition was funny and awkward. It’s the same cynicism that [Strange] has.

I was never in an awkward position where I had to curb my manhood.

If youre in an awkward position, feel comfortable enough to walk away.