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

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.

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

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.

Then his beautiful lips touched hers. A fluttering of wings, a cry of angels, a single beat of two hearts.

What is good today may be a cliche tomorrow.

for we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use

As solid rock remains unmoved by the wind, so the wise remain unmoved by blame and praise.

Trying to keep up with current slang sucks.

I think the more the actor lets you know what he thinks of the character, the less the audience cares - like a comedian who laughs at his own jokes.

I've never been in a writer's room.

I was always self-taught, there was no-one to study with when I was doing composition.

Plato, quite decadently, wore an earring while young.

When a man has not a good reason for doing a thing, he has one good reason for letting it alone.