They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing.

But I had to kill you, because the only other possible ending was us doing it, which I wasn't really emotionally ready to write about at ten.' 'Fair enough,' I say. 'But in the revision, I want to get some action.

I didn't even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it.

weltschmerz: its the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be.

Okay, maybe I'm not such a shitty writer. But I can't pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.

Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.

While I did not fancy myself a particularly good person, I never thought my first real sexual action would be prostitutional.