I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back.

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.

To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.

The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me.
Instead of paying attention to what's going on inside me.

But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing... How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?

I'm a typical American, half of me is dying to give myself away and the other half is continually rebelling.

Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark.

It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.

Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.

Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.

In this country we're unprecedentedly safe, comfortable, and well fed, with more and better venues for stimulation. And yet if you were asked, 'Is this a happy or unhappy country?' you'd check the 'unhappy' box. We're living in an era of emotional poverty, which is something that serious drug addicts feel most keenly.

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it.

I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be sedated; so it will be an inversion of standard travel, the ambulance and ER: I'll make the journey first, then depart.

I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?

It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.