If pain is a pot of boiling water, humor can be the rising steam.

The words he said, too, must be human enough to bleed.

A poet could kill the dead.

Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.

I’ve learned to fall like the BJJ player, to protect the body through controlling the distribution of force by slapping the mat with hands open. With hands open. Hands open. Open. O Pen.

Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do.

Like forearm veins, my interests spread in different directions and eventually led to the hands, to writing.

It’s cool when fashion recycles itself, it’s not cool when sustainable living does because it means there was (and is as I write) a period of absolute and possibly irreversible destruction.

Fights begin and end with handshakes.

How can I stand before you in silent symbols with open palms?

The more inhuman we became the more we understood each other as humans.

Happiness requires the ultimate sacrifice: to give up one's unhappiness.

I've tried to make a book that's accessible to the ordinary, intelligent reader. Very often books that cover this kind of subject are written by academics, for academics. But I am not an academic.

And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine.

God gave us our agency. He taught us a way. He showed us what to do. But he gave us our agency and left us free to act as we choose to do.

I didn't know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.

I want to do good work, but having kids and a life outside of that is important, too. If you don't have anybody around who loves you, then what's it all for? You're just lonely in the end.

There are times I go out and meet people and flirt, but it's not really appropriate to have anything serious.

Women's bodies are used to sell anything and everything because it works, it grabs people's attention, and advertisers aren't going to stop using something that works.

I'm very flower-like. I love classical music. I go to ballet and I cry. There's nothing so beautiful.

There's really only one true path to recovery that's using the 12 step program and finding a belief in something greater than yourself (spirituality).