Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.

When your sad--like really sad--you only want to be with other people who are sad.

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.

I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.

What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

Reading begets reading.