Power isn't free. Energy isn't free. It has to be earned.

Live free or die.

Perfection is a promise, and a reassurance that we are not wrong.

He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.

We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.

And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.

That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

He looked at me like I was the stars when all I’d ever felt like was the dark nothingness between them.

Nature has gone to great lengths to hide our subconscious from ourselves. Why?

He took me down and out into the afterlife of the brightly lit streets, a haze of rain around each streetlight like a galaxy, the whole street a universe spread out like a banquet.

I can never tell what I'm doing when I'm in the middle of publication because I have no confidence. I have terrible self-esteem, along with boundless narcissism.

While it's a great indulgence, it's also very interesting to have three bass players on the same track.

If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes. This is a tough business.

Ex-convicts prepared the eggs for the White House’s Easter Egg Roll. It’s nice to see the White House reaching out to former members of Congress.

If I had to think of what I would do different in my whole career, it's that I never would have picked up a beer, bottle of vodka. That definitely changed my life. That is an Achilles' heel for me.

Rarely do they appear great before their valets.

And all my mother came into mine eyes And gave me up to tears.