My most persistent memory of stand - up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next. Enjoyment while performing was rare - enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford.

I just downloaded eleven hundred books onto my Kindle, and now I can’t lift it.

When the person beside you is making you alert and keen and the idea of being with anyone else is not imaginable.

...it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.

There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won't stand for that.

I understood that as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet heart.

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.