What happens when we're willing to feel bad is that, sure enough, we often feel bad - but without the stress of futile avoidance. Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests, and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes parts of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined.

The average adult laughs 15 times a day; the average child, more than 400 times.

Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury.

Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don't match our own beliefs about how we should look.

All mental hygiene is based on the core practice of doing nothing. Most of us are good at wasting time, staring at the wall while telling ourselves we should be working. We call this doing nothing, but our brains are furiously active. We think constantly, and our thinking is often rife with distress.

Ten years ago, I still feared loss enough to abandon myself in order to keep things stable. I'd smile when I was sad, pretend to like people who appalled me. What I now know is that losses aren't cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.

Only since the Industrial Revolution have most people worked in places away from their homes or been left to raise small children without the help of multiple adults, making for an unsupported life.

I really do think that any deep crisis is an opportunity to make your life extraordinary in some way.

No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.

Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding.

Hopeful thinking can get you out of your fear zone and into your appreciation zone.

Caring for your inner child has a powerful and surprisingly quick result: Do it and the child heals.

Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don't. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life.

Rest until you feel like playing, then play until you feel like resting, period. Never do anything else.

Although beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, the feeling of being beautiful exists solely in the mind of the beheld.

The way we do anything is the way we do everything.

Every day brings new choices.

I love print comics.

If you come into any creative project without questions, you're gonna bore yourself, and it'll show on the page.

I think someone like Jack Kirby, for instance, would suffer greatly in the transition from print to digital were he still around.

It's always an amazing gift to be able to work with storytellers who 'get it' and who can not only draw anything but can draw it better and more dynamically than you'd ever envisioned.

Teaching is good for me. It forces me to articulate ways of doing things or rules of thumb that I've sort of taken for granted.

I think there's a moral imperative when you're writing fictional heroes to give characters who somehow give us something to aspire to as opposed to dragging them down to our level.

You can do all of the world-building you want; at the end of the day, what's important is the heart and the drive of the story and the heart and the drive of the characters.