Book

The Course of Love: A Novel

“An engrossing tale [that] provides plenty of food for thought” (People, Best New Books pick), this playful, wise, and profoundly moving second novel from the internationally bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life tracks the b

(7 total)

Characters

Alain de Botton (7)

“We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.”

— Alain de Botton, amazon.com

Tagged: Relationship, Love, Sanity

“Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.”

— Alain de Botton, amazon.com

Tagged: Marriage, Love, Relationship, Future

“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that’s ok with them.”

— Alain de Botton, amazon.com

Tagged: Intimacy, Relationship, Cute, Love

“By the standards of most love stories, our own, real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic me…”

— Alain de Botton, amazon.com

“The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn't deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why in so many love stories there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a…”

— Alain de Botton, amazon.com

“It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another.”

— Alain de Botton, amazon.com

“Never having been betrayed sets up poor preconditions for remaining faithful. Evolving into genuinely more loyal people requires us to suffer through some properly innoculative episodes, in which we feel for a time limitlessly panicked, violated and on the edge of collapse. Only then can the injunct…”

— Alain de Botton, amazon.com