I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.

Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us - many days, many nights of stars.

Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.

In my thirties I found myself, to use a colloquial fiction, in a suburban house at the foothills of the Dublin mountains. Married and with two little daughters, I led a life which would have been recognizable to any woman who had led it and to many others who had not.

I love it right now. I love being retired. I think I retired at a perfect time in my career. Now I get an opportunity to spend time with my wife and kids and get to be very supportive of them. My son is playing football right now. My daughter is in gymnastics. Both are competing at a high level. So it came at the right time.

The house wife is an unpaid employee in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee.

Kim Kardashian's marriage to Kris Humphries famously lasted 72 days, and was reported in the tabloids as being all about the big bucks paid by magazines for the bridal photos: it is a spectacle of a bride-to-be as entrepreneur, not as romantic heroine; the groom, in this scenario, is nothing but a prop.