We love and care for oodles of people, but only a few of them, if they died, would make us believe we could not continue to live. Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist. Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.

He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.

I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.

You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.