..there she is, and I am watching her through plexiglass, and she looks like Margo Roth Spiegelman, this girl I have known since I was two–this girl who was an idea that I loved. And it is only now, when she closes her notebook and places it inside a backpack next to her and then stands up and walks toward us, that I realize that the idea is not only wrong by dangerous. What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.

It was kind of a beautiful day, finally real summer in Indianapolis, warm and humid - the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world.

I love being in cities with lots of other people, because I'm reminded that there are billions of people like me, and we are each stuck inside of our minds, feverishly trying to crawl out to make connections with other people.

According to Maslow, I was stuck on the second level of the pyramid, unable to feel secure in my health and therefore unable to reach for love and respect and art and whatever else, which is, utter horseshit: The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness. Maslow's pyramid seemed to imply I was less human than other people, and most people seemed to agree with him.

We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.

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

C'mon Pudge. I'm teasing. You have to be tough. I didn't know how bad it was-- and I'm sorry, and they'll regret it-- but you have to be tough.