“There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had”

“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.”

“He loved people being messy as fuck—he said it was one of the best things about being human, how we could make such disasters and recover from them enough to make them into stories later.”

“All that you see, see in love, All that you do, do in love, All that you speak, speak in love, All that you be, be in love.”

“He looked at me with a hundred stories lit behind his eyes.”

“And if the many sayings of the wise Teach of submission I will not submit But with a spirit all unreconciled Flash an unquenched defiance to the stars.”

“Hubris it is, reader, to call one’s self the most anything in history: the most powerful, the most mistreated, the most alone.”

“The human heart is too grand to be wasted in the gutter of cultural exclusivity.”