“Why do you dwell on things that don’t matter when there are so many things that do?”

“Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.”

“That’s what I was thinking about before you came. I was thinking about your mattering business. I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It’s so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don’t even know why you need it; you just think you do.”“You don’t even know why you need to be world-famous; you just think you do.”

“Troublesome things tend to remain troublesome no matter how many times you do them.”

“Humans create terrible things. Why do they make things that only bring them pain? It’s because they don’t know what’s comfortable anymore. So perhaps they don’t know that they are in pain…”

“Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.”