Maybe all the strings inside him broke.

I'm a big believer in random capitalization. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle.

And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future - you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.

"Light, the visible reminder of Invisible Light." (T.S. Eliot)

That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.

She had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with your own.

When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can't really fully and honestly take those back, you know?

We bring the fucking rain, Q. Not the scattered showers.

"It's more impressive," I said out loud. "From a distance, I mean. You can't see the rust or the weeds or the paint cracking. You see the place as someone once imagined it."

Doing stuff never feels as good as you hope it will feel.

And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn't planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together..

She either trusted me or wanted to fall.

I always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring. I doubted I could explain it to someone like Margo, but drawing circles through life struck me as a kind of reasonable insanity.

I mean, at some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you'll look back down and see that you floated away too.

She was drunk, too, but I didn't mind her variety of drunk.

They're just people, who deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self-actualized.

It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.

"...on some fundamental level, we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals."

Consciousness makes for poor windows, too.

"..in the end, the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to."

The town was paper, but the memories were not.

And as paralyzing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final leaving felt perfect. Pure. The most distilled possible form of liberation.

It is so hard to leave - until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back.

The pleasure of leaving.

There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

We can hear others, and we can travel to them without moving, and we can imagine them, and we are all connected one to the other by a crazy root system like so many leaves of grass - but the game makes me wonder whether we can really ever fully become another.

Just remember sometimes the way you think about a person isn't the way they actually are.

People are different when you can smell them and see them up close, you know?

I can almost imagine a happiness without her, the ability to let her go, to feel our roots are connected even if I never see that leaf of grass again.

The people are the place is the people.

"Forever is composed of nows." (Emily Dickinson)

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.

But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.

"..maybe we're grass - our roots are so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive."

If you choose the strings, you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you;re saying that we are infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications.

It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them.