Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...

In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.

What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.

The cause of most of man's unhappiness is sacrificing what he wants most for what he wants now.

Looking up at the stars and smoking in silence.

12--Lose Battles, But Win The War: Grand StrategyGrand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. Focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.

Treachery and violence are a just return for treachery and violence.

He who does not get fun and enjoyment out of every day...needs to reorganize his life

I really care about you and I don't want to anymore because it feels too shitty for me.

It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations. It is the job of bank accountants.

All I wanted was what I'd already had. That exultation, that love. It was my one real home; I was a visitor everywhere else.

I come from an acting family, my father was an actor, and I had to fight my way and just create my own identity.

The world has never truly had to develop an ethic of interdependence rooted in our common humanity. And if we do it, the 21st century will be the most interesting, exciting, peaceful era in history.