Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them.

The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.

I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn’t so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.

Through [my friends] I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it...which was not really all that different from the love that is necessary in the making of art. It required the effort of always seeing them for themselves and not as I wished them to be.

This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point.

Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people.

I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.