Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.

He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want … so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons.

If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it