And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other - maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.

The phrase booze and mischief left me worrying I'd stumbled into what my mother referred to as "the wrong crowd," but for the wrong crowd, they both seemed awfully smart.

Long week. Long month. Long life.

I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going.

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

You're not boring. You've got to stop saying that, or people will start believing you.