You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)

I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.

who knows you better than your own brother?

Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I'm the only one who doesn't suffer from it.

We call them feelings because we feel them.

We used to believe that memories were best retrieved in the same place that they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that's not so clear anymore.

An "attack on SeaWorld" might mean a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government doesn't always seem to distinguish between the two.

I admired her choices though I wouldn't have made them.

Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface.

We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we’re completely beside ourselves.

Don't let your dreams rust! Listen to your youthful bells ringing loud inside of you.

It didn't matter whether he was nearby or far away. His image would drift up into your mind just when you least expected it, shocking you, making your chest pound. Making your heart ache.

Why God has instituted Prayer:— To communicate to his creatures the dignity of causation.

In the Upanishads they talk about the path of the sun and the path of the moon. The path of the moon is rebirth. The path of the sun leads to self-knowledge, from which there is no return.

That's what I paint, I paint people. They're portraits, but you won't always be pleased with the way you look in my paintings. Which is fine, I guess. Unless you're buying it, and it's of your kid!

You’re not going to cry, are you? - I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.

It's no disgrace to be old. But damn if it isn't inconvenient.

I write every day. Even if I'm not writing well, I write through it. I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank one.

In film and television you have to be able to see the whole picture in a different way than you do on the stage because you shoot out of order and you're working with technology.

Deep within every man there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the tremendous household of millions and millions.