When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like.

Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them.

I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.

Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people.

Through [my friends] I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it...which was not really all that different from the love that is necessary in the making of art. It required the effort of always seeing them for themselves and not as I wished them to be.

The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.

Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.

Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.

I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn’t so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.

Animals were both the lives I took care of and the lives who took care of me.

Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life.