“by saying you don't care if the world falls apart, in some small way you're saying you want it to stay together, on your terms.”

“i will admit there's a certain degree of giving a fuck that goes into not giving a fuck. by saying you don't care if the world falls apart, in some small way you're saying you want it to stay together, on your terms.”

“But nothing violates the rules of shutting up and not caring so much as flirting - except possibly for that enchantingly horrible moment when you act upon the flirting, that moment where you seal your heartbreak with a kiss.”

“I don't care if the New York Times writes an obituary for me. I just want you to write one. ... You say you're not special because the world doesn't know about you, but that's an insult to me. I know about you.”

“ taciturn, adj. There are days you come home silent. You say words, but you're still silent. I used to bombard you with conversational crowbars, but now I simply let the apartment fall mute. I hear you in the room -- turning on music, typing on the keys, getting up for a drink, shifting in your chair. I try to have my conversation with those sounds.”

“Everything that comes together falls apart. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you stopped suffering when they did.”

“eveything that comes together, falls apart," the Old Man said. "Everything. the chair I'm sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I'm gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you're gonna fall apart. the cells and organs and systems that make you you - they came together, grew together and so must fall apart. the buddha knew one thing that science didn't prove for millenia after his dead: entropy increases. Things fall apart."We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The buddah said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. when you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did. Some day no one will remember that she ever existed, i wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost, but with its shadow.In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying away. (...) I'd tasted her boozy breath. and then something invisible snapped inside her and that which had come together commenced to fall apart. And maybe that was the only asnwer we'd ever have. She fell apart because that's what happens.”