James Mattison

“In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of 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

“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