You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.
Books belong to their readers.
The human tongue is like wasabi: it’s very powerful, and should be used sparingly.
I don’t see a future where we’re all taught by robots. The real life, physical experience of being in a classroom and having conversations with knowledgeable people is immeasurably valuable and irreplaceable.
The internet is necessarily public. It can be filtered-public or censored-public, but it necessarily has to be open and available.
I try to live life so that I can live with myself.
I think teenagers bring a lot of intellectual sophistication. They’re wrestling with big questions. It’s just that, a lot of times they do that separately from adults.
The way we still essentializ, we’re constantly essentializing people as merely poor, or merely other, and in the end you can’t have a relationship with people. I think the biggest job of adulthood is to learn to imagine other people complexly.
When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.
Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.
Teenagers are extremely funny, and extremely clever and intellectually curious. But they’re also willing to ask questions about the meaning of life without disguising them around irony, and ask questions about what are our responsibilities to other people without having to couch it in irony.
We all matter – maybe less then a lot but always more than none.
The consequences of being un-cool feel so big that a lot of times you end of not finding ways to have open and honest conversations.
Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can’t do that until your life has grown roots.
One of the things I like about making stuff in the age of the Internet, is that people make stuff in response to it. You can see people respond to your work visually or musically or with writing.
You can’t just make me different, and then leave. Because I was fine before, Alaska. I was just fine with me and last words and school friends, and you can’t just make me different and then die.
It’s bad for your brain not to unplug.
And I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart slowly, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and nothing but herself and her mom in those last moments as she spent as a person.
I think that it’s a universal urge to have our pain not be felt alone and to have our joys not be felt alone.
If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I’d be crazier than a shithouse rat.