He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...

In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.

What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.

We may think there is willpower involved, but more likely...change is due to want power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one. Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now.

Life is inherently risky. There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing.

Never follow the crowd in what you do; the crowd has never produced anything of lasting quality, value or beauty.

Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act.

If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.

Do you realise that Eve was the only woman who ever took a man's side?

I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.

Where a chunk of business is simple, the chances are that it is.

Inspiration is a sustainable internal glow which pulls you forward.

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree