Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people.

When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like.

Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.

Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.

Animals were both the lives I took care of and the lives who took care of me.

Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life.

I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.

Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them.

While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark

All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.

The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.

He licked at her lips."We are going to have some amazing children. The best this world has ever seen.

History warns us ... that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

My children have never watched any of my films. Charlie knows that daddy makes movies, but he says they are not good enough for him to watch.

I was also in love with the English language.

Democrats, Republicans, independents, people across America. If you don't vote for me, I still want to be your president.

You don't put an animal in the corner without the animal striking back, you don't put a politician in the corner and without them expecting to strike back at you.

There's that thing about the '80s, the '40s and the '60s, and the '30s, the '50s and the '70s. Something about those odd decades in this century that weren't too pleasant.

I've always been a picky eater but I'm not the healthiest eater.

Cats cant speak, that's common sense. -Yoruichi