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

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.

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.

If your eyes could speak, what would they say?

There is no membership required for shining the light.

Oh my God, cheese burn!

That’s kind of creepy,

My driving force is spirituality.

[God brought African slaves to America] so that their descendants would know freedom.

He preacheth patience that never knew pain

Acting is not about knowing all this stuff; it's about character.

Health is a human right, not a privilege to be purchased.

My soul to-day Is far away Sailing the Vesuvian Bay.