Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Knowledge might not set you free or light your path. It could become a kind of cage.

It was the kind of scene I had wanted to see for months, a clue that beauty was still possible. Maybe it was nothing more than shifting cloud patterns. But I saw it.

The allure all these years had been the possibility of the asymptote’s line one day meeting the curve. At first this realization that I could never force a connection seemed tragic; then it became comforting to imagine that the line and the curve could go on forever. They move in the same direction, even if they never touch.

Somehow, he remains optimistic. There’s no other way to be. The only constant in this life, in this work, is the passage of time, and with it, change.

It was exciting to meander and choose who you wanted to be, what aspects of yourself to accent and adorn. You were sending a distress signal, hoping someone would come to your rescue.

we would come to recognize that concepts that seem natural to us are full of contradictions. Perhaps accepting this messiness would lead us to a more conscious and intelligent way of living.

The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another.

The true account would necessarily be joyful, rather than morose, and surrendering to joy wouldn’t mean I was abandoning you. A celebration of how it began, rather than a chronicle of free fall, a tribute to that first sip, rather than all the spinning rooms that followed. It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it w

I was always thinking about the past, pursuing other people’s memories and dashed dreams. The aspect of my course work I loved was the archival research, snooping through boxes of old files, looking for ways to access some deeper understanding of someone’s art. I was fascinated by the kinds of stories you could tell with the things someone left beh

I was eighteen, in love with my moral compass, perpetually suspicious of anyone whose words came too easily.