“We write a line we're especially proud of, and weeks later find it staring -no glaring- back at us from some stanza in George Herbert or Emily Dickinson. All poets have debts outstanding. It's how we learn; how we adore; we come to ourselves by putting those selves into the hands of masters. With experience we learn how to disguise our thefts (sometimes by flaunting them). It is how we both continue and extend a tradition. -J.D. McClatchy, Writing Between the Lines”

“We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.”

“I had this sudden awareness,' she continues, 'of how the moments of our lives go out of existence before we're conscious of having lived them. It's only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it's more like those moments are the dots in what we call our lives, or the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves.”

“We did not learn how to feel or experience our bodies, how to appreciate our own strengths, how to value or respect or understand the packages we came in. Instead, we learned how to look at them, to pair sexuality with desirability, to measure the worth of our bodies by their capacity to elicit admiration from others.”

“You are too young to know how the world changes everyday,' said Mrs Creakle, 'and how the people in it pass away. But we all have to learn it, David; some of us when we are young, some of us when we are old, some of us at all times in our lives.”

“Somewhere along the line, between the idealisms of youth and the realities of adulthood, we become pacified by our jobs; we tolerate how we hurt the world so that we can sustain our lives. At some point, blurred in the past, we traded the greater good for ourselves.”