The Romans knew it: quod me alit me extinguit, they said: That which nourishes me, extinguishes me.

I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well—but never quite perfectly, you know?

..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.

depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.

You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.

It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.

I tore open the closet door and began feverishly sorting through the shirts piled on the floor in the vain hope that inside that pile there might be some wondrously perfect shirt down there, a nice and tough but I'm also a surprisingly good listener with a true and abiding passion for cheers and those who lead them.