Quite a metaphor. The person in the most pain wins. Does that mean I get a Blue Ribbon?

Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

When things don't go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.

Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.

I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.

Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.

To me, you were more than just a person. You were a place where I finally felt at home.

So let us call genocide, genocide. Let us not minimize the deliberate murder of 1.5 million people. Let us have a moral victory that can shine as a light to all nations.

Count each affliction, whether light or grave, God's messenger sent down to thee.

All parties are good.

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

I never sing in the shower. It's very dangerous.

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

There's never one "ding-dong" moment.You never know for sure if you're doing the right thing. Things don't end all at once.

The trouble with 'a place for everything and everything in its place' is that there's always more everything than places.

I'll mix a lot of things. I'll wear a Temperley dress with flip flops, or I might be in head-to-toe Gucci and have on a ring that I got from a gumball machine for 50 cents.