It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.

That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.

Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.

Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.

If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.