You can see beauty in everything, except for yourself.

The look he gave me...My stomach quivered in that exact same way when I watched Before Sunset, yearning for a guy to know me so deeply and truly, we were only really complete when we were together. That I could talk, go on wild tangents, make obtuse references, and he would divine my meaning before I knew what I was trying to say myself. Erik had fallen asleep next to me on the couch, complaining later that the movie was "just people talking." He had no idea that this movie could have been a love letter written for me.

Maybe we don't have the same definition of about what's beautiful. So define it. Define true beauty.

I just told Max flatly, "I had laser surgery last week to lighten my birthmark," as if it was no big deal. Oh yeah?" he said. Unexpectedly, Max swiveled around, yanked his pants down. The last thing I thought I had wanted to see tonight was Merc walking out the door. I was wrong. It was this stranger's rear end. "Please don't tell me this is one of those stripping telegrams?

There is real comfort in being quiet.

[True beauty] seeps into you. It doesn't make you forget yourself, but totally the opposite. It connects you with everything and fills you with awe that you share the same space with something that glorious. Like a sunrise or a clear blue day or the most extraordinary piece of glass. And then suddenly...you have this epiphany that there's more to the world than just you and what you want or even who you are.

Like world describers before me, those mapmakers in the seventeenth centure, I had laid down my first faintly drawn border. With that one tentative mark, my world expanded by a few freeing degrees.