The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm’s Human Resources department.
Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
Never, ever become a writer. It’s a nightmare.
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.