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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.