WORDS, INCARNATED.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

“That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.”

“You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, so nothing they ache more deeply to see.”

“Nelson Mandela once said, ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’ He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, ‘I understand that you have a culture and an identity that exist beyond me. I see you as a human being.’”

But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive memory.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

He was spring, golden and bright. Envious Death would drink his blood and grow young again.

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.

And then one student said that happiness is what happens when you go to bed on the hottest night of the summer, a night so hot you can’t even wear a tee-shirt and you sleep on top of the sheets instead of under them, although try to sleep is probably more accurate. And then at some point late, late, late at night, say just a bit before dawn, the heat finally breaks and the night turns into cool and when you briefly wake up, you notice that you’re almost chilly, and in your groggy, half-consciousness, you reach over and pull the sheet around you and just that flimsy sheet makes it warm enough and you drift back off into a deep sleep. And it’s that reaching, that gesture, that reflex we have to pull what’s warm - whether it’s something or someone - toward us, that feeling we get when we do that, that feeling of being safe in the world and ready for sleep, that’s happiness.

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

“They don’t teach us that they were human beings,” said Odom. “If you would teach kids that these were regular guys who were petty, who made huge mistakes, who had affairs, who did all the horrible things that we’ve been guilty of—and they also did these wonderful things, too, that we still benefit from. Oh, Alexander Hamilton fell short of his best self every now and again, and he still managed to do these wonderful things—well, so do I. So what am I capable of?”

You must learn her. You must know the reason why she is silent. You must trace her weakest spots. You must write to her. You must remind her that you are there. You must know how long it takes for her to give up. You must be there to hold her when she is about to. You must love her because many have tried and failed. And she wants to know that she is worthy to be loved, that she is worthy to be kept. And, this is how you keep her.