I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.

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.

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.

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

In fact, the Devil is delighted when we spend our time and energy defending the Bible, as long as we do not get around to actually reading the Bible.

You can't be the cause and the cure, mon amour.

Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.

I do not think that the radio waves I have discovered will have any practical application.

For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside the animal kingdom that is comparable to a river.

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

It’s a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music.

Who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of all the universe?

She waits for me, my lady Earth, Smiles and waits and sighs; I'll say her nay, and hide away, Then take her by surprise.

I try as hard as I can for everything to be different from one movie to the next.