If you ask people what they think, they start thinking, and that’s how wars start.

I, the angel, ask you to choose one thing each from the pile. For what is now everyone’s trash was once someone’s possession. Carry this thing with you through life as a reminder of the pile within yourselves. Do not collect junk in your hearts. You can make yourself happy if you don’t let others make you unhappy.

“You’re fortunate, Lucas. You view loneliness as taking people away. But for most of us, loneliness is just adding more loneliness.”

“I’m . . . no expert. But I think most people who want to be happy try to add things to their lives. But really what maybe they should be doing is taking something away.”

This is when Lucas does something very, very stupid: he tries to be constructive and solve the problem. Any middle manager on the planet could of course have told him that this is a terrible decision, because the truth about problems is that the problem itself is never actually the problem. It’s always the people involved who are the problem. But

Lucas shudders, because “responsibility” and “commitment” are actually two of the easiest ways of ruining any perfectly good day.

breaking rules a lot easier to do if someone else has broken them first.

Because a funny thing about rule-loving people is that to them it seems more important to impose punishment than it is to actually solve problems, and a funny thing about rule-breaking people is that they seem to find

the cruelest form of interpersonal terrorism: small talk.