It took many years to understand how short a year is.

Stepping out after a dreadful night, you feel the air on your skin and it all rolls over you again: the majesty of life on earth.

Painkiller—what a beautiful word.

Bombast: thoughts and images too great for subject.
Paralysis:

He said that the better you got to know someone, the less you liked them. Animals were the opposite. Of course, you could never really know anyone. Each human being inhabited a vast chasm that could never be filled. The best you could manage was a few shovelfuls of dirt, ten miles away and ten miles down.

They weren’t real likes, they were pity likes.

20 years on, he didn’t know whether he should break down sobbing or smother her with a pillow. Probably both. He felt that way about most of his patients and it had worn him down. He was drinking too much, losing sleep and had developed a pronounced limp. Physician, destroy thyself.

The book’s celebrated “brutal honesty,” refreshing at first, is ultimately outweighed by a hipster/junky air of smug self-congratulation I’ve encountered in some AA people, reveling in their transgressive pasts while simultaneously gloating over their current virtue.

I still see them from time to time, taking their daily walk. How I’d hoped for that for us.

My note of condolence marked the beginning of the end of our friendship. Evidently grief over the loss of a cat doesn’t yield a permissible amount of insight into the the death of someone’s parent.

A vulgar preference for the novel over the good.