When you’re as charming and physically attractive as myself, it’s easy enough to win over people you meet. But getting strangers to love you...now, that’s the trick.

Is that what relationships become? A reduced version of the hurt, nothing else let in. It was more than that. I know it was more than that.

I don't think ministering requires a religious context. The number one thing is that every parent is extremely worried about their kid. Of course, when a chaplain shows up, that can exacerbate this worry rather than calm it.

She was nothing but good and I was nothing but bad, but then she died, and I didn't.

I could try to pretend that I didn't care anymore, but it could never be true again. You can't just make yourself matter, and then die, Alaska, because now, I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice.

Nothing to be gained by worrying between now and then.

The way we still essentializ, we're constantly essentializing people as merely poor, or merely other, and in the end you can't have a relationship with people. I think the biggest job of adulthood is to learn to imagine other people complexly.