“Something told her to hide the feeling from Herb. That something, that damned something, was the sense of civilized dignity that is one of our most civilized attributes, the source of so many missed opportunities.”

“A statement about luck is a statement about the mind, not about the world... We find what seems to have been the lucky break or the big mistake, and so we thank our lucky stars that we took the road less traveled or curse the fates that sent that little wavelet that flipped us on our backs. With hindsight, we seem to see that everything preceding the pivotal point was leading up to it, tending toward it, and that everything following it grew from it.To any observer outside the lucky one himself, however, luck is simply chance. Chance is neutral.”

“Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.”

“Many of us are missing something in life because we are after the second best.”

“Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.”

“Imagine you saw a colour in your dream, which you have never seen before. It doesn't consist of any colours or shades that you know. Trying to describe that colour would be as difficult as trying to belive that there is enough love & compassion in the world so every human can feel happiness.”

“Playing the cello did feel nicely neolithic, or at least a civilized way to process the primitive.”