Many, if not most, countries blithely expect their citizens to have carte blanche access to the U.S., "land of immigrants," as a veritable human right, but put up all manner of barriers to Americans who want to emigrate in the opposite direction.

But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.

Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.

Besides, I'd heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess.

it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.