The effort of love has exhausted them. They have nothing left to give to one another. The tired child inside each of them is furious at how long it has been neglected and is in pieces.

Nature embeds in us insistent dreams of success. For the species, there must be an evolutionary advantage in being hardwired for such striving; restlessness has given us cities, libraries, spaceships. But this impulse doesn’t leave much opportunity for individual equilibrium. The price of a few works of genius throughout history is a substantial

The trick is perhaps not to start a new life but to learn to reconsider the old one with less jaded and habituated eyes.

She knows at first hand that the kindness he displays with their daughter is available from him only in his role as a father, not as a husband. She has plenty of experience with his drastic change in tone once the two of them are out of earshot of the children. He is unwittingly planting an image in Esther’s mind of how a man might ideally behave

And yet the best guarantee of calm in a teacher is a relative indifference to the success or failure of his or her lesson. The serene teacher naturally wants for things to go well, but if an obdurate pupil flunks, say, trigonometry, it is—at base—the pupil’s problem. Tempers remain in check because individual students do not have very much power

Through the lens of Romanticism there can be, quite simply, no greater betrayal. Even for those willing to countenance almost every other kind of behavior, adultery remains the one seismic transgression, appalling in its violation of a series of the most sacred assumptions of love. The first of these is that one person can’t possibly claim to love

When our minds are involved in transference, we lose the ability to give people and things the benefit of the doubt; we swiftly and anxiously move towards the worst conclusions that the past once mandated. Unfortunately, to admit that we may be drawing on the confusions of the past to force an interpretation onto what’s happening now seems humbling

The modern expectation is that there will be equality in all things in the couple—which means, at heart, an equality of suffering. But calibrating grief to ensure an equal dosage is no easy task: misery is experienced subjectively, and there is always a temptation for each party to form a sincere yet competitive conviction that, in truth, his or

these helpless creatures are here to remind us that no one is, in the end, “self-made”: we are all heavily in someone’s debt. We realize that life depends, quite literally, on our capacity for love.