[of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: ‘I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny.

This is what's so terrifying about being lonely: the instinctive sense that it is literally repulsive, inhibiting contact at just the moment contact is most required.

Collapse, spread, merging, union: these things sound like the opposite of loneliness, and yet intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying.

There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure.

Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth.

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.

You don't need to justify your love, you don't need to explain your love, you just need to practice your love. Practice creates the master.

Let your love flow where the beautiful things are and something beautiful will always come your way.

In Paris, the dance was everything. The dance of romance was what a man could remember in his old age. Didn’t all young Americans come to Europe in search of that kind of romance?

Sinful pleasure can ruin our appetite for the things of God.

Whenever you are examining someone else's belongings, you are bound to learn many interesting things about the person of which you were not previously aware.

Read to live another life, even if only for a chapter.

I believe that I am God's exact intention. It's that balance of virtue and vice.

It is not by great acts but by small failures that freedom dies. . . . Justice and liberty die quietly, because men first learn to ignore injustice and then no longer recognize it.

It is harder to fight pleasure than to fight emotion.

Having the reality of God's presence is not dependent on our being in a particular circumstance or place, but is only dependent on our determination to keep the Lord before us continually.