People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.

She would stay on the road and in hiding, a balloon floating through the sky, eating up hundreds of miles a day with a help of the perpetual tailwind.

The five of us walking confidently in a row, I'd never felt cooler. The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible. The plan may have had faults, but we did not.

I stood under the awning for a moment, but finally I decided that being in a bad mood with your friends beats being in a bad mood without them.

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

Uh-uh, dude. I tried it your way with the dating and the girls and the kissing and the drama, and man, I didn't like it. Plus, my best friend is a walking cautionary tale of what happens to you when romantic relationships don't involve marriage. Like you always say, kafir, everything ends in breakup, divorce, or death. I want to narrow my misery options to divorce or death - that's all.

I love you present tense.