My Own Devices: Essays From the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love

Every breath is borrowed by the lungful; you can’t save them for later or hold a single one for long. And even a chestful of air is too much cargo for some trips. Some places you have to go empty.

Loneliness is the fare that you pay to be free.

It’s impossible to know which moments are crucial to your narrative until the story is over.

I don't believe in fate or destiny or that everything turns out for the best. I'll concede that everything happens for a reason but only as a very general statement of causation. Some lousy things happen for really lousy reasons.

There’s no best-practice handbook for the pursuit of unlikely dreams.

What if brain is to mind as hand is to fist? Like, maybe the mind is something that the brain can make of itself, a posture it can hold. We have a lap when we sit down, but not when we stand—even though we always have legs. We always have a brain but only have a mind when we’re conscious or dreaming, and not when we’re in surgery or dead.

But that trick—getting people to like you a little bit right away—is not achieved simply by administering a small dose of the same magic that could get them to love you for a lifetime. They are different compounds entirely. Charisma is an excellent attractant, but lousy glue.

Free will is just the ghost we strap into the machine when the manual gets confusing.

These hours are numbered, I can't afford to waste any in transit.

X and I were only good at the feeling of love, not the behavior. Which is like knowing how to dive, but not how to swim.

Sometimes it felt like we were forged out of something more durable than love—or maybe loyalty is just love fossilized.

Water is the key to life, man.

I’d learn there was a word for those moods, and that they often linked to menstrual cycles.