facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.

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 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.

Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.

Freedom from one man is just another one.

Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.

Need is what tears people apart. When you want someone, you never really need them. But as soon as you start to need someone, they no longer want you.

I had learned years ago never to give original documents to anyone if I could help it.

Anyone that ever accomplished anything, did not know how they were going to do it. They only knew they were going to do it.

The griefs of private men are soon allayed, But not of kings.

The hawk's cry is as sharp as its beak.

There are certain times when I feel more inspired, filled with a strong power that forces me to listen to my inner voice, and when I feel more need than ever for a Pleyel piano.

My book had a universal theme. It's not a "racial" novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.

I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.

I mainly let my imagination be my reality. Fantasy is my reality.

Smile and maybe tomorrow you'll see that life is still worth while if you just smile