What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.

Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

I wonder if everyone who faces death hurts like this. It's as though for the first time I realize how much just being alive makes my body ache. But I don't want that ache to stop.

I read obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once.

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

I sometimes throw in a couple of swears just to keep the Christian right off my tail. I wouldn't want to be the tea party's go-to comedian.

Our political leaders must be honest and forthcoming with data that will allow citizens to use facts and figures to judge for themselves what state Social Security is in.

Children need to see that they are assumed to be well-intentioned, naturally social people who are trying to do the right thing and who want reliable reactions from their elders to guide them.

Dreading that climax of all human ills the inflammation of his weekly bills.

Just because they say they're praying for you in your face, doesn't mean they aren't laughing at your struggle behind your back.

My father taught me that reputation, not money, was the most important thing in the world.