“When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act ...”

“After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see hi...”

“The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the fla...”

“Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where...”

“It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be ...”

“A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.”

“There are all these relationships that are like cookie cutter shapes; identical and repetitive. Then there are all these relationships that aren't even relationships! Just facades for show and tell...”

“But witchy magic doesnt listen to please and pretty please, and anyway, I didnt really care. I only pretended to care because not caring makes me a monster.”

“All that day she felt as if she were acting in a theatre with better actors than herself, and that her bad performance was spoiling the whole affair.”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”

“To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.”

“The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.”

“The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them.”