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

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

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

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

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

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?