My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.

I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.

sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.