He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.

"It was a wretched little koan: how can you help someone who won't be helped while realizing that if you don't try to help, then you're not being a friend at all?" Learned a new word today!

That's the way the mind works: the human brain is genetically disposed toward organization, yet if not tightly controlled, will link one imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest of pretense & in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regard for logic or chronological sequence.

We teach girls shame. Close your legs. Cover yourself. We make them feel as though by being born female, they are already guilty of something. And so girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. Who silence themselves. Who cannot say what they truly think. Who have turned pretense into an art form.

"That'll kill you," he warns. "You're better off not thinking at all."
In a way, I wish I could be like that. You'd never worry or care about anything that really mattered. You'd be happy, in the same pitiful way someone like our friend is. Nothing affects you, and you affect nothing.

"There's even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human."