“Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.”

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

“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 person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.”

“The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.”

“We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.”

“Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.”

“The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world, sanctuaries for those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific 'poets'.”