“The better you learn to take care of yourself, the less you settle for being around people who can't or won't treat you as well as you're accustomed.”

“To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you're not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?”

“You don't make waves unless there's a reason, and it better be good. Because once you do, that's it. You're a trouble make, and they never think of you any other way.”

“...if it's great reverence you're looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude - well, then you don't work with kids.”

“There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.”

“Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which... is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into their adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises when the occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you lived under a shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement.”

“See, I always forget this about you," he says, and even now, long after we first lost our privacy, I can't help wondering who's overhearing him. "Every decade, you like to pin me to the ground, pull open my mouth, and take a sh** right into it.”