I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.

I want to be violated by insight.

We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart.

It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.

Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn't appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.

…kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.

...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.

Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.

I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.

It was not a comfortable Throne, this seat made of stone. But power was not supposed to be comfortable.

Psychopaths know intellectually what is immoral they just don't have a feeling of immorality about it.

I will make a prophecy that may now sound peculiar. In fifty years Lincoln's name will be inscribed close to Washington's on this Republic's roll of honor.

There are some men's souls that are so thin, so almost destitute of what is the true idea of soul, that were not the guardian angels so keen-sighted, they would altogether overlook them.

[A]s a lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal.

Chat to the ghosts! That's what I do!

Begin your day with prayer, and make it so soulful that it may remain with you until the evening.

It's better to use a curse word than to hurt somebody else, I find.

What I love about new technology is that it really pushes the art. It really pushes it in a way that you can't imagine until you come up with the idea. It's idea-based. You can do anything.

To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.