Everyone lies about sex, more or less, to themselves if not to others, to others if not to themselves, exaggerating its importance or minimizing its pull.

How much simpler it would be all around if you could put your mind in a cast, like a broken ankle, and elicit murmurings of sympathy from other people instead of skepticism (“You can’t really be feeling as bad as all that”) and in some cases outright hostility (“Maybe if you stopped thinking about yourself so much ”).

It was through reading that I discovered the crucial, even sacrosanct place the rituals of drinking held in the American imagination - the ingenious way alcohol seemed to lubricate everything from onerous chitchat to self-conscious sexual advances.

There's something stubborn about families, unhappy ones in particular: they outlive themselves, and then they live on.

Naturally, our own irrational demands strike us as having the force of needs, while other people's needs strike us as capricious indulgences.

Then again, as those who suffer from it know, intractable depression creates a planet all its own, largely impermeable to influence from others except as shadow presences, urging you to come out and rejoin the world, take in a movie, go out for a bite, cheer up.

Much as I try to disguise myself, there is never a time when I'm not aware of being overweight.