I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was nobody home.

It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be.

The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that.

There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail us.

There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.

If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.

When you're young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand new penny, but before you get to wonderful you're going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good long look, because that may be as far as you're ever going to go.

I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I can not accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I can not accommodate myself to it. And now I will have to be that person forever.

If love drove people mad, what would lack of love do?

I think kissing is what separates us from the animals and makes us divine.