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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.