I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don’t understand you at all stick around.

But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars.

I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.

The late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist, and social observer, wrote in his autobiographical Appointments, 1890-1901 (1902), "When one travels abroad, one doesn't so much discover the hidden Wonders of the World, but the hidden wonders of the individuals with whom one is traveling. They may turn out to afford a stirring view, a rather dull landscape, or a terrain so treacherous one finds it's best to forget the entire affair and return home.

I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.

Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness, and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.

What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off.