... she called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy.

You say into my cracks and I saw into yours.

Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.

Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.

She’s the kind of person who either dies tragically at twenty-seven, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, or else grows up to win, like, the first-ever Nobel Prize for Awesome.

...it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.