Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.

Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people.

When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like.

Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.

Animals were both the lives I took care of and the lives who took care of me.

Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life.

I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.

Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them.

While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark

All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.

The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.

[Based upon the message of "nothing new under the sun" in Ecclesiastes, ] If nothing ever changes, then God has no plan.

They do say money is the root of all evil."I thought that was supposed to be the love of money."There's neat for you. 'Tis them without it that loves it best.

The only benefit a woman can have in talking too much is defeating a man who troubles her too much.

It is as a soldier that you make love and as a lover that you make war.

We are all so privileged to be citizens of America, and we all need to be engaged.

Of course I want to be [prime minister].

If there was anything I'd learned, it's that the man never chooses the woman. All he can do is give her an opportunity to choose him.

Those trees seem to grow every year.

I do not like it when other people dress up. I like everyone to be THEMSELVES.

Two wrongs don't make a right.