She spoke quietly then, the tiniest crack in her voice, and all at once Lacey Pemerton was not Lacey Pemberton. She was just—like, a person.

Here's to all the places we went. And all the places we'll go. And here's to me, whispering again and again and again and again: iloveyou

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.

The Z’s will kill us all, and then the Z’s will die out and in sixty years there will be no one to remember our silly war, Caroline’s wasted ammunition, my year of zombic survivalism, Rene DesCartes’s musings, or Michelangelo’s sculptures. And that is really only the sadness here as I drink a thousand-dollar bottle of wine down here in the cellar: We did a few things worth remembering, and I wish for someone to remember them.

I pulled the oxygen tubes from my nostrils and raised the tube up over my head, handing it to Dad. I wanted it to be just me and just him.

The Colonel explained to me that 1. this was Alaska's room, and that 2. she had a single room because the girl who was supposed to be her roommate got kicked out at the end of last year, and that 3. Alaska had cigarettes, although the Colonel neglected to ask whether 4. I smoked, which 5. I didn't.

Love is always a miracle, everywhere,every time. But for us, it's a little different. I don't want to say it's more miraculous,...It is though.