My throat tightened, but I held back the tears and reminded myself that withdrawing from a woman is no different than kicking a drug; you feel shaky and you want it, but eventually the need passes, and you feel restored.

Most of you guys can't see the potential in a nervous breakdown. A real collapse. There's more chance of finding yourself in a major depression than there is in a bottle Prozac.

What was it about not knowing a person that allowed you to wonder whether she might be the answer to all your problems?

Plenty of people who survive tragedies end up ambivalent about danger--frightened by it, yet strangely drawn to it.

Because depression is so thematically powerful and so dark, when it's very severe, it can make people feel not only as if they've lost a loving connection, but as if the whole world is devoid of love. So if we wonder how somebody could take 149 people with him when he commits suicide, one answer can be that depression, when it's most severe, can make people feel that life is completely without value, not just for them but for anyone.

The good guys had to operate on a higher level than the killers--just for society to keep track of who was who.

...the horrific fact that our lives and those of the people we love are impermanent and exquisitely fragile, that any of us can cease to exist without warning, that loving anyone, anywhere, at any time, leaves you infinitely vulnerable at every single moment. (20)