"Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us."

"Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them."

"The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be."

"One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy."

"Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species."