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.

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.

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.

It's important to have your private enjoyments because sometimes that's all we have.

If an obstacle in the real world can be eliminated in the mind then it can no longer resist to exist in the real world!

My will is free and connected to my Spirit. When I exercise my free will, I am calm, at peace and serene.

Sometimes, we miss the truth when it's right in front of us, she thought. Sometimes the closer we are, the harder it is to see.

When stupidity knocks at the door, it is stupidity that opens it.

I think that what most surprises anybody who goes into politics from even a modestly cerebral background is the vulgarity of much of the cut and thrust of politics.

...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.

It is absurd to entrust the defense of a country to people who own nothing in it.

My parents were really strict about me not watching cartoons.

But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.