Well, far be it from me to say, but there is more to this world than swimming really fast. There are many different possible lives ahead fo you. Like I said last week, you could be a glaciologist.

'Want', she told her, in a measured...

Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently.

'It's hard to predict, isn't it?' she asked, looking blankly in front of her as she moved a black bishop across the board to take a white pawn. 'The things that will make us happy.'

Regrets don't l...

His voice, she realised, didn't sound like she remembered. It sounded emptier. A bit colder. Maybe it was tiredness. Maybe it was stress. Maybe it was marriage.

Bertrand Russell wrote that 'To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead'... But Bertrand R...

The thing she once loved about swimming was the disappearing. In the water, her focus had been so pure that she thought of nothing else. Any school or home worries vanished. The art of swimming - she supposed like any art - was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less foc...

'Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.'

When you stay to long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes...

Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff.

The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks that human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature solitude took on a different character. It became in itsled a connect...

Everything humans see is a simplification.

Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.

You can be anything you want to be. You are limited only...

It would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness.