stories don’t just make us matter to each other—maybe they’re also the only way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long.

He put his arms around me and squeezed tight, so that I felt the heaves of his chest as we realized over and over again that we were still alive. I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought "God we must look so lame," but it doesn't matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.

People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the though of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believe in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.

I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, "This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.

Long week. Long month. Long life.

Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re gonna do. I’m just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. ... You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What.

You deserve a life.

Love is the most common miracle.