Why do they even call it that, “saving yourself”? Like we need to be rescued from sex? It’s not like virgins spend their whole lives engaged in the sacred ceremony of “being saved” from intercourse.

How many beers do y’all think it takes before one internationally scientist turns to another and says, ‘Dude, bet you twenty bucks I can levitate a frog with a magnet?’ ‘ Sam drawled.

No one went looking for adventure; they chased it away.

Life is the tragedy,’ she said bitterly. ‘You know how they categorize Shakespeare’s plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it’s a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it’s a tragedy. So...

We’re living tragedies, just passing time ’til our funerals.

I don’t see the point in caffeine without coffee. Or coffee without caffeine, for that matter,” I informed him.

If everything really does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. But that’s crap, because better isn’t quantifiable.

The world tends toward chaos, you know,” Cassidy said. You could too. Just write down a made up name, or even a fictional character. And the next person who finds this geocache, it’s as though...

And that was when I saw what Cassidy had done to herself: the gold and red ribbing on her sweater-vest, the matching stripes on her tie, the gray uniform skirt, and the navy blazer draped...

That’s all you can do in this world, no matter how strong the current beats against you, or how heavy your burden, or how tragic your love story. You keep going.

I still think that everyone’s life, no matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst – the first step in the equation....

Still here, Faulkner?” Luke sneered.”Still doing that terrible impression of Draco Malfoy?” I asked.

Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that’s all. I don’t know if he’s right, but I do know that I spent...

I wondered what things what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we’d gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.

Not at all, I just don’t understand how the Arch Alchemist became mortal all of a sudden.””Because he split his soul into seven pieces and hid them all over Justice City,” Toby retorted.”You turned our...

You see? You’re just figuring it out now, but I discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each...

I pictured her tragically; it never once ocurred to me to picture her as the tragedy.

Maybe I’d already guessed that the physics of us didn’t defy any laws of gravity, and with her, there was always an equal and opposite reaction.

We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary–made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn’t whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it’s whether or not you...

Sometimes I think that everyone has a tragedy waiting for them, that the people buying milk in their pajamas or picking their noses at stoplights could only be moments away from disaster. That everyone’s life,...

Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I’d learned early on that my sense...

Steinbeck wrote about the tide pools and how profoundly they illustrate the interconnectedness of all things, folded together in an ever-expanding universe that’s bound by the elastic string of time. He said that one should...

And I realized that there’s a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.

And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself.

Oh come on,’Pheobe continued. ‘You’re asking for it. Pale skin, black clothes, no lunch and that whole brooding thing? It’s hilarious. You should get body glitter and go after an unsuspecting freshman.”You should!’ Cassidy agreed....

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn’t a metaphor. It was the greatest failing on everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so...

You’re funny.’ Phoebe passed me the last chocolate cupcake. ‘And I always thought your friends were laughing over their own farts.”Ninety percent of Eastwood’s male population laughs over their own farts. Present company excluded, naturally.