One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who are unable to connect with the profound—people such as my boring brother-in-law, a hearty type so concerned with normality and fitting in that he eliminates any possibility of uniqueness for himself and his own personality. I wonder if some day, when he is older, he will wake up and the deeper part of him will realize that he has never allowed himself to truly exist, and he will cry with regret and shame and grief.

I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.

Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.

I am a quiet man. I tend to think things through and try not to say too much. But here I am, saying perhaps too much. But there are these feelings inside me which need badly to escape, I guess. And this makes me feel relieved because one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity- the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary- to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss.

If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.

What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story -- something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.