According to Maslow, I was stuck on the second level of the pyramid, unable to feel secure in my health and therefore unable to reach for love and respect and art and whatever else, which is, utter horseshit: The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness. Maslow's pyramid seemed to imply I was less human than other people, and most people seemed to agree with him.

We all miss you so much. It just never ends. It feels like we were all wounded in your battle, Caroline. I miss you. I love you.

And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.

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

The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

I ran like a cheetah - well, like a cheetah that smoked too much.