It’s easy to forgo distractions and to not accumulate things when you have a larger goal on the horizon.

It was a sad loss, this illusion of importance, a humbling blow.

There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind.

It turned out that some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled.

Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.

I am about to die. It is September 11, and every cell in my body is acutely aware of my looming demise. The certainty of it. The inevitability. Not years from now, not weeks nor days. Moments.

He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.