You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to.

This was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die."- Paper Towns

What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.

That's how writing works, at least for me: even the stuff that doesn't work out gets funneled into the stuff that does work out.

But it was only hot outside, and generally I only walked outside between one air-conditioned place to another.

We think that we are invincible because we are.

He lit a cigarette and handed it to me. I inhaled. Coughed. Wheezed. Gasped for breath. Coughed again. Considered vomiting. Grabbed the swinging bench, head spinning, and threw the cigarette to the ground and stomped on it, convinced my Great Perhaps did not involve cigarettes.