That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through a little speaker. [...] I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time.

September 11 had such a strong visual component, the most visually documented event in human history. Nothing's ever been seen by as many people as that was. Our experiences of the day, our memories of the day are just so tied up in images of buildings falling and bodies falling.

Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged, it was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.