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

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.

Life is a fantasy.

I was an economics major, which I enjoyed because I had a good business sense.

I know that there is not in the world a more subtle poison than that which is extracted from and administered by books.

The north! the north! from out the north What founts of light are breaking forth, And streaming up these evening skies, A glorious wonder to our eyes!

A man must defend his home, his wife, his children, and his martini.

Did we risk our lives to defend a just society, where guilt must be proven and not assumed? Or are we no better than the oppressive kings from whom our fathers fled?

Jed Diamond is, quite simply, one of the wisest men writing today on the topic of male emotional and physical health.

A search always starts with Beginner's Luck and ends with the Test of the Conqueror.

In the university of God, however brilliant you may be, you will not be given double promotion. You must take every course, because each course serves a purpose.

There’s nothing more amazing than the sound of a screaming crowd. Nothing.