“I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q…”

This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger.

It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It’s the mathematical logic of being alive.

That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.

Before she knew it was candles, did she think she’d done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips.

Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn’t love me – I felt the wash of her love every day.

But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think?

It was a fleeting statement, one I didn’t think she’d hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us.

And the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?

That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother’s palm and fingertips.

But I loved George in part because he believed me; because if I stood in a cold, plain room and yelled FIRE, he would walk over and ask me why.

To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.

We’re all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there’s too much thought and not enough heart.

Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

You can ruin anything if you focus at it.

I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.

Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

Building a wardrobe is like building a circle of friends your whole life…. Your own beauty is to be yourself, but of course we need tools and accessories.

On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

In a narrow circle the mind grows narrow. The more one expands, the larger their aims.

In a narrow circle the mind contracts. Man grows with his expanded needs.

Have Love. Not love alone for one, but man as man they brother call; and scatter like the circling sun thy charities on all.

I think each role takes a little from you and circles around you for the rest of your life. I don’t think you ever abandon any of them.