When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

I am shy by nature, a person who's always found something burdensome about human interaction and who probably always will, at least to some degree.

I once heard a woman who had lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue and without a dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I'd amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give, dogs can introduce us to several colors with names like wildness, nurturance, trust and joy.

Love—the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete—is the constant on the continuum of hunger, it's what links the anorexic to the garden-variety dieter, it's the persistent pulse of need and yearning behind the reach for food, for sex, for something.

For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times.

The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.

Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.