“Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?”

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.

Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.

The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee’s knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else

I’m sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.

Every moment before this one depends on this one.

She said, “Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don’t need?” I said, “It depends on what it means to need.

In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.

It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.

Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.

We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.

It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.

Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?