She’s the kind of person who either dies tragically at twenty-seven, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, or else grows up to win, like, the first-ever Nobel Prize for Awesome.

By saying you don’t care if the world falls apart, in some small way you’re saying you want it to stay together, on your own terms.

I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him - that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.

As much as life can suck, it always beats the alternative.

[This] is very important to remember when reading or writing or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.