Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that's true whether you're reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It's always an imagining of what it's like to be someone else.

I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.

What matters to you defines your mattering.

Beware of that monster called 'self-loathing'.

Patience, grasshopper," I counseled. "You don't want to seem overeager." "Right, that's why I said tomorrow," he said. "I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.

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

The universe is biased toward consciousness because the universe wants to be noticed. It's a way into existential hope that doesn't have too much cliché wrapped around it.