I'm never shaken or stirred.

I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.

…I've had a bad week." What's happened?" Nothing's happened. I've had a bad week in my head, is all.

We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.

Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.

I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.

It's no wonder we're all such a mess, is it? We're like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it.

He's at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.

She thought I was...soulful, by which I think she means that I don't say much and I always look vaguely pissed off.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.

“A person of honor chooses to loss his honor rather than his consicience”

“Our understanding is conducted solely by means of the word: anyone who falsifies it betrays public society. It is the only tool by which we communicate our wishes and our thoughts; it is our soul’s interpreter: if we lack that, we can no longer hold together; we can no longer know each other. When words deceive us, it breaks all intercourse and loosens the bonds of our polity.”

“We thought we were tying our marriage-knots more tightly by removing all means of undoing them;22 but the tighter we pulled the knot of constraint the looser and slacker became the knot of our will and affection. In Rome, on the contrary, what made marriages honoured and secure for so long a period was freedom to break them at will. Men loved their wives more because they could lose them; and during a period when anyone was quite free to divorce, more than five hundred years went by before a single one did”

“I care not so much what I am in the opinion of others, as what I am in my own.”

“There is nothing more unsociable than man, and nothing more sociable: unsociable by his vice, sociable by his nature.”

“Friendship on the contrary is enjoyed in proportion to our desire: since it is a matter of the mind, with our souls being purified by practising it”

“For I make others say what I cannot say so well,... I do not count my borrowings, but, weight them.... They are all, or very nearly all, from such famous and ancient names that they seem to identify themselves enough without me. ”

“The time is now proper for us to reform backward; more by dissenting than by agreeing; by differing more than by consent.”

“I know nothing about education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.”

“Let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my garden not being finished. (tr. Charles Cotton)”

“A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.”

“Whether we are running our home or studying or hunting or following any other sport, we should go to the very boundaries of pleasure but take good care not to be involved beyond the point where it begins to be mingled with pain.”

“There is an old Greek saying that men are tormented not by things themselves but by what they think about them. If that assertion could be proved to be always true everywhere it would be an important point gained of the comforting of our wretched human condition. For if ills can only enter us through our judgemente it would seem to be in our power either to despise them or to deflect them towards the good: if the things actually do trow themselves on our mercy why do we not act as their masters and accomodate them to our advantage? If what we call evil or torment are only evil or torment insofar as our mental apprehension endows them with those qualities when it lies within our power to change those qualities. And if we did have such a choice and were free from constraint we would be curiously mad to pull in the direction which hurst us most, endowing sickness, poverty or insolence with a bad and bitter taste when we could give them a pleasent one, Fortune simply furnishing us with the matter and leaving it to us to supply the form. Let us see whether a case can be made for what we call evil not being an evil in itself or (since it amounts to the same) whether at least it is up to us to endow it with a different savour and aspect.”