Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you.

An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand.

Our kiss was niticlimactic. It wasn't that the kiss was bad, but it was just a note of punctuation in our long conversation, a parenthetical remark made in order to assure each other of a deeply felt agreement, a mutual offer of companionship, which is so much more rare than sexual passion or even love.

At the most simplistic level physicists tell us that what we see as reality is not actually accurate. A rock looks solid to us but it's full of empty space and atoms moving and we see it as solid because we need to because it helps us survive, right? Survival being our goal. You can extrapolate that to many other things.

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

He held my hand and told me a story about when he was six and threw a rock at a kid's head who was bullying his brother, and how after that no one had bothered either of them again. 'You have to stick up for yourself,' he told me. 'But it's bad to throw rocks,' I said. 'I know. You're smarter than me. You'll find something better than rocks.

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.