For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always

She never acted as if she liked him all that much, but then she never acted as if she liked anyone all that much.

I jog through the halls and then go upstairs to Jane’s locker and carefully slip the note I wrote last night through the vent: To: The Locker Houdini From: Will Grayson Re: An Expert in the Field of Good Boyfriends? Dear Jane, Just so you know: e. e. cummings cheated on both of his wives. With prostitutes. Yours, Will Grayson

Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortable as possible? What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of the universe, this line of inquiry inevitably reduces us to asking what it means to be human and whether—to borrow a phrase from the angst-encumbered sixteeen-year-olds you no doubt revile—there is a point to it all.

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.