“I see all this talent, all this…this energy and brightness and…potential. Yes. Potential. And I cannot for the life of me see how you can be content to live this tiny life.”

Somewhere in this world is a man who loves you, who understands how precious and clever and kind you are.

They began to tune up, and suddenly the auditorium was filled with a single sound.

And I don’t want to look at you every day, to see you naked,to watch you wandering around the annexe in your crazy dresses and not…not be able to do what I want with you.

If I don’t cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it’s failed.

Real friends were the kind where you pick up where you’d left off, whether it be a week since you’d seen each other or two years.

All I can say is that you make me… you make me into someone I couldn’t even imagine.

“I’m fine. I just…I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about…I just…want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.

I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay.

That old hangover is just toying with you, working out when to bite.

“What if I like watching television? What if I don’t want to do much else other than read a book?”.

“What if I’m tired when I get home? What if I don’t fill my days with frenetic activity?” “But one day you might wish you had.”

The most alive, three-dimensional thing I had ever heard. It made the hairs on my skin stand up, my breath catch in my throat….

You have all grown up expecting things to go your way almost instantaneously.

This life that will take place almost entirely within a five mile radius and contain nobody who will ever surprise you or push you or show you things that will leave your head spinning and unable to sleep at night.

I could have told you. I hate horses, and horse racing. Always have. But you didn’t bother to ask me.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

The water rose further and dressed Simon’s coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble.

What’s so great about brightness? My flashlight has it. It can’t help us rid ourselves of our suffering.

It’s an effulgence of the mind. It’s a brightness that is truly sensitive and accepting. It’s an ability to accept life as it is.

When you rest in quietness and your image of yourself fades, and your image of the world fades, and your ideas of others fade, what’s left? A brightness, a radiant emptiness that is simply what you are.

Put a very clever man next to a genius, his brightness will immediately turn to dullness!

Deep within, I still exist; a brighter, happy me. Just look beyond my outer casing.