I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life

Half my life is an act of revision.

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.

…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.