If I scribbled a few words on a cocktail napkin and showed it to my family, they'd proclaim it astonishing and more culturally relevant than the Bible.

He said you couldn't pretend the terrible things in life didn't happen. You can't clean it up. You keep all the refuse and the scars. It's how you learn. And try to make improvements.

I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don’t understand you at all stick around.

What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?

…deep-diving love, a love that excavates you. It’s something you have to have before you die in order to have lived.

I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.

She told me her father taught her to live life way beyond the cusp of it, way out in the outer reaches where most people never had the guts to go, where you got hurt. Where there was unimaginable beauty and pain ... They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming way, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaids sang, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now.