The French verb aimer has two meanings. And that’s why he liked her, and loved her. She spoke to him in a language that, no matter how hard you studied it, could not be completely understood.

Leaving feels too good, once you leave.

As lives go, I'll take the quietly desperate over the radically bipolar.

Shame about how we’re gonna die here, though. I mean, seriously. An Arab and a half-Jew enter a store in Tennessee. It’s the beginning of a joke, and the punch line is “sodomy’’.

At least it was instant. At least there wasn't any pain." I knew he was only trying to help, but he didn't get it. There was pain. A dul endless pain in my gut that wouldn't go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the bathroom, dry-heaving.

We have this weird thing in the world where you don't get insulted for what you do, you get insulted for who you are.

Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.