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

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

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.

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

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.

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