We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.

And then it was the kind of dark your eyes never adjust to.

In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business—and I wanted to try to reflect that.

They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing.

Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering

In the contemporary world where things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold, you have to imagine a community where there is no centre. Hank, at the end of this year I started thinking that a lot of life is about doing things that don’t suck with people who don’t suck.

And as paralyzing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final leaving felt perfect. Pure. The most distilled possible form of liberation.