Neil Gaiman - Love "Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."
"more harm is done in life through incompetence and stupidity than outright evil. Stupidity is seen as a form of imbalance. Animals have their instincts to depend on in danger. We have our reason and rationality. When we lose those reasoning powers, it is like falling between two stools: we cannot depend on our instincts, and we cannot depend on our intelligence. We fall and create waves of problems. . . . It is hard to fight the weight of stupidity as it crushes us with the years, but only good things can come from the effort." - Robert Greene