There is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry. - Alain de Botton

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

An understandable hunger for … potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, … immune to the methods of factory farming.

Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be.