From the Margin.

“Maybe adulthood is mostly learning what not to explain. Not because you've stopped caring what people think, but because you've finally worked out that most explanations were really just apologies for existing as you are, and you've decided to stop paying that particular tax.”

“We don't always miss people. Sometimes we miss who we were around them — a version of ourselves that only existed in that particular friendship, and that we have no other way of getting back to.”

“Some questions become more important when they stop having answers. We treat silence as absence, but sometimes it's the only honest response left to a question that was never going to fit inside language to begin with.”

“Certainty is comfortable to hold and expensive to defend. The people I trust most tend to say 'I think' more than 'I know' — not from weakness, but because they've done the work of actually finding out how complicated the thing they're discussing really is.”

“Attention is the last truly scarce thing we own, and we spend it the way people spend money they don't believe is really theirs — quickly, carelessly, on things that don't remember being given it.”

“We don't keep old notebooks because we'll reread them. We keep them because throwing them away would mean admitting the person who filled them is no longer available for comment, and some part of us isn't ready to close that file.”