I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.

Freedom from one man is just another one.

Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.

facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.

Did not the souls also of the righteous ask question of these things in their chambers, saying, "How long shall I hope on this fashion?" when cometh the fruit of the floor of our reward?

When someone is stalking you because they think you are stalking them, it makes you wonder who really is the true stalker?

For the majority of people, though they do not know what to do with this life, long for another that shall have no end.

A good story or a book is all about it's power to hold it's readers still till the very last word of it's climax - complexity in language, dialogues, descriptions, everything else is secondary!

Oh, I steal things all the time. It's just something I do. I stopped caring a long time ago.

The most insignificant score is the score at halftime.

You had to grow up sometime. The fellows who grew early, they were in jeopardy. They became the cops and the crooks, and the crooks became the gangsters. The crooks became the Al Capones.

If you go into a store, with a gun, and rob it, you have forfeited your right to not get shot

A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.

As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.