Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?

I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.