James Mattison

“Certainly travelers had returned from the heart and tried to represent what they had seen, but love was in the end like a species of rare colored butterfly, often sighted, but rarely conclusively identified.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.”
― Alain de Botton, Essays In Love

“The forthrightness of the middle-aged seducer is rarely a matter of confidence or arrogance; it is instead a species of impatient despair born of a pitiful awareness of the ever-increasing proximity of death.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself”
― Simone de Beauvoir