I didn't enjoy what was happening but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy.

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.

Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to rediscover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me (often without my knowing it).

My fervent hope is that it would be possible for me and my family to leave for the U.S. on Hillary Clinton's plane.

If you want to be happy, all you have to do is be happy.

I'm not big on the Beavers right now, I know David Pollack is big on the Beavers, he's sipping that Beaver juice.

I have listened to much dull and heavy conversation in America, but rarely to any that I could strictly call silly (if I except the every where privileged class of very young ladies).

You have to be able to swim in backlash.

The life of millions is my politics, from which I dare not free myself without denying my life-work and God.

To walk into the Jefferson memorial is to be in a temple of the pure idolatry of reason

I don't ask questions. I just figure the extra warm days are God's way of rewarding me for Garden State