I consider fiction a very high-class form of lying. I enjoy and admire it enormously, but I don't think I'm very good at it.

Our skin is what stands between us and the world.

My mother always said I must be part Mongolian because of my lotus-pale complexion and squid-ink black hair.

As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.

Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we're reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can't even talk or think about it directly.

The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.

Despite not knowing if what he felt from moment to moment would pass or last forever, he entered fully into his shifting states of violent rage, self-pity, longing, heartbreak, cynicism, without losing the ability to think about what was happening to him. That took courage, I thought, living with the suffering in a mindful way, as an artifact of being, neither good nor bad.