“Rock stars did not invent burning out. They just do it louder.”

“Her universe is such a big place full of so many galaxies-100 billion of them with 100 billion stars apiece which means 10 to the 22nd power stars-that it’s terrifying to think of the odds that we found each other. We want to freeze the perfect moment hold on to it at least long enough to understand it. But it dances on with us or without us so we jump in and try to keep up. The universe is expanding and we are just two of a billion stars.”

“We couldn't believe how exciting it was to be together, a pair of young Americruisers on a roll. We'd lived for just twenty-five years; we weren't planning to die for fifty more. We danced and drank and went to rock shows. Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.”

“I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That's the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn't make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid.Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts.”

“Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renée’s bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star’s Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She’d never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I’d told every other woman I’d ever fallen for: “I’ll make you a tape!”

“Did I learn anything? No way. But all the things you want to learn fromgrief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn. There are no revelations, no wisdoms as a trade-off for the things you have lost. Youjust get stupider, more selfish. Colder and grimmer. You forget your keys. You leave the house and panic that you won’t remember where you live.You know less than you ever did. You keep crossing thresholds of grief and you think, Maybe this one will unveil some sublime truth about life anddeath and pain. But on the other side, there’s just more grief.”

“It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing.”