When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.

Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

'Do you know,' he asked in a delicious accent, 'what Dom Pérignon said after inventing champagne?' 'No?' I said. 'He called out to his fellow monks, 'Come quickly: I am tasting the stars!'

Something about telling that story made my gut grow back together." What?" Oh, nothing. Just thinking out loud." That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of." The people who've been in your secret hiding places." The people you bite your thumb in front of." Hi." Hi." ..." ..." Wow. My first Lindsey." My second Colin." That was fun. Let's try it again." Sold." ..." ..." ...".

No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.

That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.

Well," Peter Van Houten said, extending his hand to me. "It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures." I shook his swollen hand, and then he shook hands with Augustus. I was wondering what ontologically meant. Regardless, I liked it. Augustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses.