Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.

I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.

Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board.

Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer.

People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.

All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.

It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.

Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.

I drew it over my skin like a violins bow, No one would ever hear the song of my shame.

If you want to get ahead in life, I've found that perhaps the most useless word in the world is "tomorrow.

What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

New Yorkers are born all over the country, and then they come to New York City and it hits them: Oh, that’s who I am.

As inclination changes, thus ebbs and flows the unstable tide of public judgment.

There is no cheating in nature and the simple unsought feelings of the soul. There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.

.....there are approximately 125 billion miles of DNA in a human body -- your personal DNA is long enough to wrap around the earth 5 million times.

Acting is half shame, half glory. Shame at exhibiting yourself, glory when you can forget yourself.

It's okay to be lost in college.

The method of magnitude estimation provided a direct measure of sensation.