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

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.

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.

There is only one social responsibility of business - to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits without deception or fraud.

The fashion wears out more apparel than the man.

A birthday is a good time to begin a new; throwing away the old habits, as you would old clothes, and never putting them again.

The constraints that humankind has set upon itself are so narrow, so rigid. If you don't wear your clothes one day, they'll lock you up. That's a pretty simple action.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

Even if you think the grass is greener on the other side, you’re going to have to mow that side too.

Home Run portrays the church in its beauty--true life transformation through real and honest relationships with one another and with Jesus.

I don't think it's "true" to sit and play old school heavy metal just so that you can send it to Fenriz or get a pat on the back from the guys you admire and hang out with.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

Domestic violence was a way of life in my home growing up, my brother and I watched helplessly numerous times as my mother was beaten and knocked unconscious while we dialed 911.