There is a blessing in losing the one we love. It's the blessing of self-transformation. You don't have to who you were anymore. You've struggled. And now you can change. It doesn't mean that bits of that person won't cling to you, they will throughout your life, but they are now subsumed into something greater. That person has given you, in fact, the most important blessing, which is they gave you the blessing of transforming your soul into something better, something more beautiful.

Your own love story? Your paramour may have had lovers before you. But no one has ever loved him the way you do. No one has ever heard music. Not the way you hear it. The songs are beautiful vampires, asleep in your iPod, coming alive at night, aglow. You can have them on your hours, yours to conduct. Music shapes us and we shape it.

My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or don't mean.

It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.

I didn't know there was something really wrong, because everyone was crazy. It's just that everyone else was still functional. I didn't realize that I was any worse off.

I think that's the function of a lot of psychiatrists and therapists, is keeping people afloat just long enough for them to get older.

Jeff Bridges says that the reason he's one of the few stars in Hollywood whose made his marriage last for decades is that every time they think there's no more doors left to walk through in the room, they just keep looking and keep looking until they find one.