Quotes from Will Leitch

You don't really know anything about yourself until you've been forced to deal with pain, real pain.

You gotta give yourself oxygen before you can give it to anyone else. I have to put my own mask on first.

The key thing is, don't worry about if anyone is reading you or not. Figure out your voice and figure out what you want to write about, what you're good at, what you like doing.

Grief, Mom discovered, was not a problem you could fix, a loose screw you could tighten, a math problem you could solve, a child whose pain you could comfort. It just sat there in your stomach and didn't move. Sometimes it grew, sometimes it shrank, but it was always, always there. That was the hardest part, she said, harder than anything else, before or after. The grief doesn't leave. It becomes a part of you. Either you learn to live with it or you die.

People are kind to one another in the real world, even if it's a meaningless kindness. It goes unremarked upon. But it shouldn't. We are always much angrier on our phones than we are in the real world.

intercostal muscles. They are located between your ribs, and basically, they are how you breathe.

People are always surprised my speaker doesn't sound like Stephen Hawking. It's a pleasant, vaguely British man's voice. A little like a mechanical, stilted Colin Firth.

What a strange instrument a tuba is. I wonder how many different shapes they twisted that metal into until they realized that a tuba's shape was the exact one they needed to make that exact sound.

In the movies, when you wake up after some sort of accident, you open your eyes and see the face of a loved one hovering above you, calling out your name, an incantation of love and worry and devotion. You look for the light. They bring you back from the brink.

I'm a guy with a disease that eventually kills everybody who has it, and eventually it's going to kill me. I am glad it wasn't today. I hope it's not for a long, long time. But let's not kid ourselves. It's going to happen, and when it happens, I don't want Marjani or Travis or my mom or this Jennifer person who is suddenly the matriarch of this weird little family to be kicking themselves up and down over it.

I have brought light into this world, and I have been given light from this world. And what light it is! I can say that I have lived. Can you say that you have lived? You must be able to say you have lived. I have loved, and I have been loved. That is all we should want. This is all you have to do right now. It's right in front of you. So just take it. I know I plan to.

Age has a way of giving humans a gravitas that they haven't earned. Like most people, I have essentially the same personality I had at twenty-two. But because a decade has passed since then, I'm given more authority now. I'm thought of as wiser. I'm not. The same shit will happen in another decade. I'll still be the same guy. But "wiser." And as much of an idiot as ever. I like it. I could get used to this adult business.

We don't live in a series of plot points. We should be thankful for that. We should realize how lucky we are.

You know it's Sunday because no one in their right mind would ever opt for Zaxby's over Chick-fil-A unless it were Sunday and they had no choice.