The History of Sound: Stories

But you should have a little pain in your life—humans are meant to have a little pain. Endings, I suppose, like seasons, like winters. That’s where all the good stuff is. Ripped apart, so you can feel the mending.

You’d be surprised how many men can go through life without knowing what they’re doing, telling people they know what they’re doing.

We all know that sunlight will never come at night, that you certainly can’t walk on sunlight, and that, most important, the afterlife itself—the supposed end of the sunlit ramp—is likely a space imagined by people hoping to ease their grief for the ones they’ve lost.

Years out of college, he read that the part of the brain activated for love and the part activated for grief were quite close, physically. Love can be a type of euphoric grief, the author wrote. There are stages: self-delusion, understanding, and—most important—the obsession, in a different way than grief, with another person.