Pudge, my friend, we are indefuckingstructible.

Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.

Grief does not change you. It reveals you. And herein lies the gift that cannot die. It changes the course of your life forever. If you allow yourself the chance to feel it for as long as you need to - even if it is for the rest of your life - you will be guided by it. You will become someone it would have been impossible for you to be, and in this way your loved one lives on, in you

You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller, and that's the secret weapon of the bookstore - is that no algorithm will ever understand readers the way that other readers can understand readers.

the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.

Without pain, we couldn't know joy.

What about the rest of your life?" She shrugged. "What about it?" "Aren't you worried about, like, forever?" "Forever is composed of nows," she says.