Mom sobbed something into Dad's chest that I wish I hadn't heard, and that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said, "I won't be a mom anymore." It gutted me pretty badly.

Nothing has ever looked like that ever in all of human history.

Don't lie to anyone, but particularly don't lie to millennials. They just know. They can smell it. Be yourself: if you're old, be old. If you don't know anything about pop culture, don't pretend to know anything about pop culture. When you credit teenagers with intelligence and emotional sophistication, they respond intelligently and with emotional sophistication.

I inherited that penchant for intellectualism, a character flaw that these days can only be thoroughly eradicated by getting Z’ed up.

You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet.

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

You had been a paper boy to me all these years - two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real.