“I had learned many times that the more you try to get people to deny their illusions, the stronger the illusions can become. But if you indulge those delusions instead, they often fall apart on their own.”

“For reasons I can only guess, my mother always instructed me that it was impolite to tell the truth...Whatever she lacked in versimilitude, she more than made up for in stealth.”

“It happened in the autumn of the year, when murder feels at home, because so many other things are dying.”

“The Internet is to our intellectual life what the universal unconscious is to our psychological life. In fact, the Internet is the new universal unconscious. It's not even a metaphor anymore.”

“Sometimes history turns on that little: a single moment, a single bullet.”

“Given my upbringing and my life in general, it's not so hard to imagine that my mind would capsize eventually.”

“The importance of falling in love lies not in how it feels, but in what it perceives. And as always with our feelings, the key moral issue is how truthful the perception is... Falling in love is a sign that this might be someone with whom you could make a good marriage. Still, it's not enough, because the feeling is not always as perceptive as it should be... So falling in love is not the basis for a good marriage. It's not even a requirement. Marriage does not depend on falling in love; it depends on the promises you make to each other in your wedding vows and then spend a lifetime keeping. As many people have pointed out, you can't promise how you'll feel. But you can promise to cultivate a virtue, such as the virtue of love.”