The world is like a dropped pie most of the time. Don't kill yourself trying to put it back together. Just grab a fork and eat some of it off the floor. Then carry on.

We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.

the beauty of doing nothing

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.

It's what I call the haute couture, high-end version of fear perfectionism. It's just fear in really good shoes. But it's still fear.

When I read the article [in The New Yorker] by David Grann, I was very struck by people responding to the article, of people thinking I was such a hero and what a wonderful person I was, and I didn't feel that at all. I felt like I had very much, like Todd [Willingham], taken a path of self-preservation.

The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught by a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it--even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.