“Really? I think of self-loathing as being so universal. We all have so many symptoms.”

“I guess I just always thought that people are the way we are,” he said. “Like, we grow and evolve, to a certain extent, and maybe our behavior changes, but so much of what makes us ourselves is innate, or intractable. But what if the bad stuff is like a parasite? What if it’s something you can actually isolate and remove, like—I don’t know,

The very act of telling the story was not like photography; he didn’t know how to capture moments as they were. It was more like sculpture, starting from the raw materials of lived experience and chiseling away at it until it had revealed what he wanted to see, or what he thought the world wanted to see.

We’re not with her in the present as she’s falling in love, we’re with her as she goes back into her memories, with all the grief and longing and distance that comes with the passage of time.

Instead, there was a louder thought, a thought Sam had never had before: that is just another person existing in his body. And it was true. That was all he was. It was so simple that it was almost maddening.

You have to keep making the choice to fix yourself. Every time you choose to be nice to yourself instead of being unkind. Every time you decide to experience life fully in all its shades of joy and sorrow. Every time you participate in the boring drudgery of self-care. The whole thing was the healing—everything that came before and everything

grinning at the pleasure of having found one another, at the stupid and endlessly affirming joy of being in love.

He had never loved things that much until they were

“I think we all do that, don’t we?” Buck said. “We all, you know, tell stories about ourselves and get attached to the version of us that we think we are. You just made yours public.”