I learned to pick up each piece, one at a time, from my pile of potential matches and try to fit it from any angle into the socket, then discard it and move on. Each failure is meaningless. It's not me, it's the pieces, and I have to, absolutely must, try each and every piece every possible way until I find one that fits. They aren't failures, they're steps, small bits of progress.

A person’s life story is equal to what they have plus what they want most in the world, minus what they’re actually willing to sacrifice for it.

When you’re in love, your brain secretes endorphins into your blood. Organic morphine leaks out of a gland in your skull, feels like a low-grade opium rush. Some people confuse the two, the head rush and the love. You think you’re in love with a person, but you’re in love with a syringe.

It's taken me years of practice to learn how to act natural.

Only everyone forgets how seldom our memory is accurate. Having more memory is just a way of distorting a greater amount of the past"p.193

The combination to be on guard for is young and bored, or young and resentful. You can spot them at social gatherings, the grad students or interns who tell you about syndromes, conditions, deviances, and disorders, and they love, love, love to talk. They speak in half-sentences with a knowing smile-squint, watch you falter at the pause, and then keep talking.

Everything in the universe is everything else. A man is a killer is a saint is a monkey is a cockroach is a goldfish is a whale, and the Devil is just the angel who asked for More.