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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.