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

The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?

If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going.

I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.