Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.

Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.

I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.

Academic achievement was something I'd always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.

In the garden of humanity every baby is a fresh new flower who can smile, laugh, giggle, dance, love and sing with mother earth.

But too much love is poison, especially when that love is not returned

I loved learning to fight and kill zombies.

Rich people don't pay taxes? Of course they pay taxes - they pay tons in taxes. They pay for everyone else who doesn't pay taxes.

I pretend to understand because I don't want anybody to be hurt

New ideas must use old buildings

A little love and affection in everything you do will make the world a better place with or without you.

One's single greatest strength may be uncovering the hidden talents of another person.

The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.

The Poet, gentle creature as he is, Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times; His fits when he is neither sick nor well, Though no distress be near him but his own Unmanageable thoughts.