The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you'll think "they'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.

You know what ambrosia tastes like? It tastes like all the things you can't eat on Weight Watchers. Cheeseburgers, sugar cookies, regular freaking ice cream instead of, like, ice cream that's made out of air and human hope.

You can't just make me different and then leave. You can't. You can't change me and make my whole life centered around you, then leave.

What's the point in being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.

You can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can't say that Alabamans as a people are duly afraid of deep fryers.

Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.

One of the jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our everyday lives.