To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.

What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?

Love is a powerful painkiller.

Some strangers become more important to you than family, maybe because you're not expected to love them. You can leave them whenever you want to. They can, too. Every moment together is a choice.

Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn

A writer has a use for his experiences that most civilians simply don't; he or she discerns material in situations that others simply live through. Perhaps there are some who disapprove of this, but without this double consciousness, literature would not get made at all.

I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.