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

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.

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

Animals were both the lives I took care of and the lives who took care of me.

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

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

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.