“The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.”

“It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.”

“It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.”

“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.”

“Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.”

“The travails of being an employee include not only uncertainty about the duration of one's employment, but also the humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. With most businesses shaped like pyramids, in which a wide base of employees gives way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be rewarded - and who left behind - typically develops into one of the most oppressive of the workplace, and one which, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its oppositie can acquire an apparently haphazard connection to results. The succesful alpinist of organizational pyramids may not be the best at their jobs, but those who have best mastered a range of dark political arts in which civilized life does not usually offer instruction.”

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