When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.

I've been thinking so much about writing as a gift to readers - and how newness of subject (place or topic or person) is one of the biggest gifts at our disposal.

Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.

Salvation is sanctification of soul by the Blessed Saviour.

There are only two things in life, ' Bergé said. 'Love and beauty.

Even Heaven would be Hell to some people because they'd be too close to God!

Belief releases creative powers.

My thoughts, I guess, are bitter; who but the bitter have thoughts?

Sadly, black people disassociate ourselves from the things which make us who we are, identifying them as lesser, or inferior. It's a form of self hate.

I try to go to the gym three to four times a week and mix it up with yoga or a personal trainer.

There hasn't been a scandal this big at the C.I.A. since (CLASSIFIED) committed (CENSORED) to (REDACTED).

The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the popes.

We cheer everyone who goes off to Hollywood and tells American stories but telling Australian stories is the greatest thing you can do.