It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

Suffering is universal. it’s the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.

I was a fairly shy person - not the hand raising type.

But you know what they say about Gutshot: the population never goes up and never goes down, because every time a woman gets pregnant, a man leaves town.

While I did not fancy myself a particularly good person, I never thought my first real sexual action would be prostitutional.

In the first century CE, Roman authorities punished St. Apollonia by crushing her teeth one by one with pliers. Colin often thought about this in relationship to the monotony of dumping: we have thirty-two teeth. After a while, having each tooth individually destroyed probably gets repetitive, even dull. But it never stops hurting.

So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that's not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered. I have found this very useful to think about over the years, and I find that it is a lot easier and more bearable to be sad when you aren't constantly berating yourself for being sad.