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

For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence.

We have allowed our love stories to end too early. We seem to know too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.

Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.

Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who know how carefully to administer varied doses of hope and despair.

A person cannot be at once a libertine and a married Romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be.

We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

the truth is that being yourself... fully yourself around another human being is a treat that you should probably spare anyone that you claim to love