What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.

The truth hurts because it's real. It hurts because it mattered. And that's an important thing to acknowledge to yourself.

Babies are made through an act that you will eventually find intriguing but for right now will just sort of horrify you, and also sometimes people do stuff that involves baby-making parts that does not actually involve making babies, like for instance kiss each other in places that are not on the face.

You know how we make a Scotch and water in this home?" "No, sir," Gus said. "We pour Scotch into a glass and then call to mind thoughts of water, and then we mix the actual Scotch with the abstracted idea of water.

Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.

Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.

Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn't the way they actually are... People are different when you can smell them and see them up close.