When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.”

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death

He wanted, acutely in that moment, to be not-alive. Not to be dead, not to kill himself, but to have the burden of living lifted from his shoulders.

I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it,” Orkideh said. “I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside.”

sonder. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

“Expendable” may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.

the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life.

From a distance, habit passing for happiness.

Roya used to say I was a good listener. Mostly, though, I was just a bad talker.