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

I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.

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

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

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

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.

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