There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.

The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business...I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.

Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing that we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.