I treated despair in terms of hierarchy: if there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was negated. I thought I simply had to accept the fact that I was ugly, and that to feel despair about it was simply wrong.

Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.

Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.

Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life.

All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.

While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark

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