Of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him-inevitably. And that's what I'd felt as he reached for me: I'd felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.

He loved the scratching of pencil against paper when he was focused: it meant something was happening.

The light filtered throught the leaves and pine needles above as if through lace, the ground spotted in shadow.

What happened?" "During the kiss?" "No, with you and Caroline." "Oh," he said. And then after a second, "Caroline is no longer suffering from personhood.

I did some research on this a couple years ago," Augustus continued. "I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?" "And are there?" "Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about

Don't worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway

The worse the haircut, the better the man.