It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities... And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance... we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.
Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real lives.
Whatever the benefits of prolific and convenient air travel, we may curse it for its smooth subversion of our attempts to use journeys to make lasting changes in our lives.
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’.
Beauty is a promise of happiness.
We could not be fulfilled if we weren’t inauthentic some of the time – inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb.
A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.
The sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.
One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.
It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble.
There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.
When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.
Chamfort, echoing the misanthropic attitude of generations of philosophers before and after him, put the matter simply: ‘Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.
Our ‘ego’ or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated and vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect.