I think people who are religious are more likely to want one around, but it's a very secular position.

We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus.

When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.

You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town.

It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do.

I write about broken people who need other people in order to go on. But those are the only kind of people I know to exist. We are all broken.

People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.