For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.

What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.

It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.

Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.