What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant.

All of us, poor & rich alike, have been conditioned by our upbringings. Impoverished men & women may become lulled into a state of "learned helplessness" without hope to change their lives. Likewise, the wealthy can walk in a state of "learned blindness" ignoring the desperation of the local & global poor.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

If I had cared about her as I should have, as I thought I did, how could I have let her go?

We are greater than the sum of our parts.

In English, we don't have a word for people who aren't virgins. What the non-virgin lexical gap really made me think was that our obsession with sexual purity is such that once you are no longer this THING, you are indescribable.

She was not an adventure, she was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.