What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.

To learn and to love, that is what we are here for, any activity which is not grounded in one of these two is a waste of time.

So we reach into the raging chaos, and we cling to it, and we tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.

The one thing you share with every mortal is death.

There's a virtue,' Felix said, 'to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth.