It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

The internet is necessarily public. It can be filtered-public or censored-public, but it necessarily has to be open and available.

How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked. “Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.

I came to the conclusion a while ago that there is nothing romantic or supernatural about loving someone: Love is the privilege of being responsible for another. It was, for a time, what kept me going: Each morning, for a little while, I got to feel the weight of the yoke on my back as I pulled the ancient cart of my species.

Think for one minute of those who have loved you up into this day.

At the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.