“Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.”

“I was happy without having sought happiness.”

“I had no friends. Was I happy? I was wildly happy. Sitting on my bed, which took up most of the space in that narrow room, I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly here in New York...”

“It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and...”

“Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn't happy there. Then, after reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows....”

“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”

“At the end of the day were all reactive personalities. We just dont know it until we meet the right catalyst.”

“Love is the most powerful catalyst. It can change a heart and the world.”

“The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of t...”

“He never cried, not even when his alarm went off. Swaddled in his Moses basket, wires trailing out the bottom, his monitor flashing green, green, green, his entire four-pound body motionless except...”

“From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. ”

“Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.”

“But who can remember pain, once its over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In lif...”

“My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely ...”