Every day as I wave to my children when I drop them off at school, or let one of them have a new experience—like crossing the street without holding my hand—I experience the struggle between love and non-attachment. It is hard to bear—the extreme love of one’s child and the thought that ultimately the child belongs to the world. There is this horrible design flaw—children are supposed to grow up and away from you; and one of you will die first.

Neither am I on an extreme diet nor am I on an extreme workout.

Even years from now, once I've stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy who makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it's good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it's toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn't buy into the bullshit about temperance.

Both friend and enemy reside within us. One lives by the rule of compassion, the other by the rule of hard knocks. Though potential influence of either extreme is inevitable, our actions bear witness to the one we embrace.

Only those prepared to go too far will learn how far they can go.

If you're going to do something, strive to do it better than anyone else. Do it all the way. If you're going to half-ass it, why bother?

They prefer a God of an altogether softer flavor. Nothing too extreme. Complaisance, not magnanimity. They do not think upon the “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God.” They prefer to think in terms of “God liking them.” That’s the God they’ve conjured for themselves.

Going to the extreme of inviting and welcoming people into your church in order to hear you condemn them or to know from your policy that you condemn them is not much better than bullying.

Anyone who feels to much or radiates extremity gets very lonely.

In 1988, a cave explorer named Véronique Le Guen volunteered for an extreme experiment: to live alone in an underground cavern in southern France without a clock for one hundred and eleven days, monitored by scientists who wished to study the human body's natural rhythms in the absence of time cues. For a while, she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. She described herself as being 'psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my purpose in life.'When she returned to society, her husband later noted, she seemed to have an emptiness inside her that she was unable to fully express. 'While I was alone in my cave I was my own judge,' she said. 'You are your own most severe judge. You must never lie or all is lost. The strongest sentiment I brought out of the cave is that in my life I will never tolerate lying.' A little more than a year later, Le Guen swallowed an overdose of barbiturates and lay down in her car in Paris, a suicide at age thirty-three.