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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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