I have some memories of certain things that happened in high school when I was stoned out of my mind, but I talked with other people about them, and I trusted the aggregated memories.

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.

If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.

If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.

The world is merciless, and it's also very beautiful.

At liminality, at a transitional point between his last night dream and reality, he realizes he has made a big mistake and happiness is possible without death. (Coming back to himself.)

Just because an apple falls one hundred times out of a hundred does not mean it will fall on the hundred and first.

Sometimes it feels like even ifEvery inch of my skin was touching yoursI still wouldn’t be close enough to you.

Like plumbing, medicine is a profession where you learn early on not to put your fingers in your mouth.

By 2016, the people who had looked to [Barack] Obama for change were looking somewhere else.

And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains - a further chapter in the history of the mystery.

The minute you're born, you're getting older.

God gives salvation to the needy, but gives the deep things of His heart to the hungry who refuse to live without them.

I don’t think there’s anything positive in the WCW brand at all. It was dead when they brought it. They were going to bury us when they did business.