Literature is the original Internet – every footnote, every citation, every allusion is essentially a hyperlink to another text, to another mind.

We go through life seeing reality not as it really is, in its unfathomable depths of complexity and contradiction, but as we hope or fear or expect it to be. Too often, we confuse certainty for truth and the strength of our beliefs for the strength of the evidence. When we collide with the unexpected, with the antipode to our hopes, we are plunged into bewildered despair. We rise from the pit only by love. Perhaps Keats had it slightly wrong — perhaps truth is love and love is truth.

We are always harshest upon those foibles we see in others that we know bedevil our own natures - the ones that most gravely misbecome our self image - for blame is always easier than shame.