famous, though not in a meaningful way.

What she actually wanted to know: Who are you? Who do you plan on becoming? And the truth, which I couldn’t admit outright, was that I didn’t have any idea—not yet.

I often wondered what percentage of things I said were truly original, and how much of what I said I’d heard said before and was only repeating.

She is in love, which feels, to her, at once easy and hard, elemental and ungraspable—like vanishing and eternity at the same time.

All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention. I notice it now, my present: my grandson’s kind face, his warm hand in mine, and the smell and sensation—here the words, in any language, fail—of being alive. Chinese is a language that exists in the present tense. In this way, it is unlike English, a language in whic

A wise person once said, “I want to be less afraid of friends’ judgment and more enthralled by their perspectives.”

Aren’t we lucky? Our DNA encodes for innumerable possible people, and yet it’s you and I who are here—winners in a stupefying lottery. We came at the exact right moment, a blip in the hundred million centuries of the universe: the Earth inhabitable, not yet engulfed by the sun, but not only molten magma, inhospitable to life. The planet cooled and

Once she had believed that connection meant sameness, consensus, harmony. Having everything in common. And now she understood that the opposite was true: that connection was more valuable—more remarkable—for the fact of differences. Friendship didn’t require blunting the richness of yourself to find common ground. Sometimes it was that, but it was

As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.