Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.

Freedom from one man is just another one.

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.

facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.

Books open a realm to a world beyond our own, all one has to do is take a leap of faith, open one, and step through the gate, passed the veil of myth on into the unknown.

In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.

And this, " cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across the room, "is your opinion of me! This is the estimation in which you hold me! I thank you for explaining it so fully.

Be secret and exult Because of all things known That is most difficult.

If a man keeps cherishing his old knowledge so as continually to be acquiring new, he may be a teacher of others.

Art is man added to Nature.

Before games, the smell of burgers wafts down from the stands.

Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.

The Lord sees weaknesses differently than He does rebellion.

Joys come from simple and natural things: mists over meadows, sunlight on leaves, the path of the moon over water.