but there was nothing I could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intra cranial firecrackers

..there she is, and I am watching her through plexiglass, and she looks like Margo Roth Spiegelman, this girl I have known since I was two–this girl who was an idea that I loved. And it is only now, when she closes her notebook and places it inside a backpack next to her and then stands up and walks toward us, that I realize that the idea is not only wrong by dangerous. What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.

Teenagers are extremely funny, and extremely clever and intellectually curious. But they're also willing to ask questions about the meaning of life without disguising them around irony, and ask questions about what are our responsibilities to other people without having to couch it in irony.

She said 'I love you' as if it were a secret, and an immense one.

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.

The important thing is not whatever nonsense the voices are saying, but what the voices are feeling.

What's the point in being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.