Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.

To dream is to possess.

We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.

Everybody's business is nobody's business, and nobody's business is my business.

I'm always awoken with the joyous sound and laughter of my son. That's the best part about being a mom.

Since time is a continuum, the moment is always different, so the music is always different.

People at the University of Portland were accepting and loving and open-minded. When you have a safety net, it allows you to take risks.

If there were a Mount Rushmore of American humor, Terry Southern would be the mountain they'd carve it from

Art Exists for the human species. I think that all of the people who love art, those who teach art, and all of you should burn with the obligation to save the world

Believe. Believe in yourself. Believe in others. Believe there is positive in everything.