Empathy is a kind of care but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough.

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.

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.

You can shine as a light in this world and you will be safe. The divine has your back.

As the unexpected becomes ordinary, the spotlight shifts once again to land where your brain thinks it will get more informational bang for the attentional buck.

And a woman needs a man to protect her from other men. Well, women used to. . . . Things have changed. Women are in the middle East, fighting and protecting men now.

In addition to unfinished business, some ghosts haunt so that they will be remembered.

Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne, they rise, they break, and to that sea return.

Fall seven times stand up eight.

We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace.

The world is a work of art that gives birth to itself.

Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.

Sensationalism seems to sell more than wonderful-positive news.