Jed Rubenfeld quotes:

A woman's love for a man is half animal passion and half hate. The more a woman loves a man, the more she hates him.

If he wants meaning-the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life-a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain.

Unhappiness is caused when we cannot let go of our memories.

A woman is at her greatest peril in the presence of a beautiful man.

What i literally cannot describe is the hollowness in my lungs when i am out of her presence. It is as if i were dying from the want of her.

Disgust is so reassuring; it feels like a moral proof.

There is a condition into which many young women fall. They attach themselves to violent men. They forgive any mistreatment. They think it love; it isn't. What they really want is to be punished for their sins, real and imagined - or for someone else's

For society, marriage is undoubtedly beneficial. But the burdens of civilized morality are too heavy for many to bear.

Death releases the energy into air. If a true catastrophe is looming, the disturbance becomes such that a sensitive individual may become highly troubled by it. He may be aware exactly when and where it will occur. He may see an aura around people who are soon to die. Or he may see images of the disaster beforehand...

But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The way of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning--the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life--a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.

THERE IS NO mystery to happiness. Unhappy men are alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn--or worse, indifference--cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.