“Atheists’ anger doesn’t prove that we’re selfish, or joyless, or miserable. It shows that we have compassion, and a sense of justice. We’re angry because we see terrible harm all around us, and we feel desperately motivated to stop it.”

“I knew in that moment, we were never meant to surrender our childlike innocence, to trade a world in which we fit like a glove for one that hung on us like ill-fitting hand-me-downs. However, all about us insisted on our membership. And instead of a handshake or a mystical password as entrance into this spurious society, we agreed instead to share a lie, the one that says we’re safe, secure, and fulfilled living this way.”

“Every one of us lives this life just once, if we are honest, to live once is enough.”

“It struck me that the beauty we attribute to children isn’t something they have that we don’t. It's something they do, which we have long since stopped doing—just describing things as we see them, the simple, unadorned facts.”

“We are just living the way we are meant to grow.”

“I like the sea: we understand one another. It is always yearning, sighing for something it cannot have; and so am I.”

“It was a weird kind of desperation. We knew frenzied fucking, and we knew covert quickies, but this was something else entirely.”