Ours was not a political household, when I was growing up.

To have a reason to get up in the morning, it is necessary to have some kind of guiding principle. A belief of some kind

...let the emotional weight of a scene rest on the dialogue wherever possible. This is the easy way to avoid overinterpretation, which seems to be what turns a scene from sympathetic to sentimental.

With my friends, I don't feel pressure to be someone other than who I am.

Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.

Ours was not a political household, when I was growing up.

And if you ever do a survey, you'll find that people prefer illusion to reality, ten to one. Twenty, even.