Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

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.

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.

What do you want in life?

Once the rains abated, my father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper.

No nation is ever taller than when on its knees.

My work is never just fashion, landscape, or portraiture; it's always kind of an odd mixture of everything. I like muddling it together.

The way to achieve your own success is to be willing to help somebody else get it first.

Anything that I write comes from the soul.

The point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. It's who we are right now, and that's what we can make friends with and celebrate.

Everybody has their black moments.

Sentiment never was and never can be a guarantee for justice.

There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this.