The girls you meet are never very far from their worst-case scenario.

May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.

My theory is that church used to be that place. Instead of being a place where you went to look good, it was a place where you could risk going every week to look your worst.

I'm giving you my life to prove to myself I can, I really can love somebody. Even when I'm not getting paid, I can give love and happiness and charm. You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody.

The body ages. grows. passes through near-lunatic phases of reproductive frenzy, but you are born and die essentially the same person. That... that is proof of your deathless soul.

Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.

Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't.