The ability to be alone is the ability to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it’s not. It is an existential truth: only those who can be alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another human being—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.

The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.