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

When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like.

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

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

Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?

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