“To learn from him, I did not have to believe he was a good man or a fair man.”

“Pictures and words don't hurt anyone, except for those who are afraid of history.”

“What if . . . you come to the wild and discover that it is not wild at all? What if half the world is here before you?”

“It is a simple thing, a name. We are given one, we grow in to it, we bear it. Simple for the rest of creation.”

“How did you wage a battle for a man’s spirit when the man himself wasn’t sure he wanted you to win?”

“When he had shown me all he led me to his door. "Why do you collect such things?" I asked hime before I ventured out upon the Strand."When a child is born, he looks first only to his mother. As he grows he learns he has an entire household around him, filled with servants and sweets. Still later he ventures into the streets, and hears the ragman cry, or sees the cocks fight. He learns his letters, his Latin, his arithmetic. Always he is looking beyond himself, and learning. But one day, if he is like most men, he stops. He thinks he has learned all." He smiled at me."I did not choose to stop, that is all.”

“And here, after all that, is what I have come to believe about beauty: Laughter is beautiful. Kindness is beautiful. Cellulite is beautiful. Softness and plumpness and roundness are beautiful. It's more important to be interesting, to be vivid, and to be adventurous, than to sit pretty for pictures. A woman's soft tummy is a miracle of nature. Beauty comes from tenderness. Beauty comes from variety, from specificity, from the fact that no person in the world looks exactly like anyone else. Beauty comes from the tragedy that each person's life is destined to be lost to time. I believe women are too hard on themselves. I believe that when you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you. I believe the eyes see everything through the heart - and nothing in the world feels as good as resting them on someone you love. I have trained my eyes to look for beauty, and I've gotten very good at finding it. You can argue and tell me it's not true, but I really don't care what anyone says. I have come, at last, to believe in the title I came up with for the book: Everyone Is Beautiful.”