And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn't quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.

Here's something else you might as well learn now: If you want something, if you take it for your own, you'll always be taking it from someone else. That's a rule too. And something must die so that others can live.

It's funny, isn't it? When you are young you just want to be old, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.

They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all. But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

This is what happens when you try to help people. You get screwed.

But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.

The only thing worse than having no friends is being pitied for having no friends.