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For Whites, thinking of oneself only as an individual is a legacy of White privilege."

"He has never heard the knock, and so he'll never know what it means to miss that sound, to listen for it."

"Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don't."

"All you have to do is watch a child ride her bike directly into a brick wall or jump from the tallest branch of a sycamore tree to know that we humans are reckless with out bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is in some ways, to live fully."

"The only guaranteed way to avoid addiction is to never try drugs.This sounds simple enough and the politicians and zealots who preach abstinence in all manner of things will have us believe that it is simple enough. Perhaps it would be simple if we weren't human, the only animal in the known world that is willing to try something new, fun, pointless, dangerous, thrilling, stupid, even if we might die in the trying."

"I am angry that she [mother] doesn't understand me, doesn't see me as my own, separate person, but that anger stems from the fact that I don't see her that way either. I want her to know what I want the same way I know it. intimately, immediately."

... They want reassurances. They want to believe that they have been loved enough and have raised children well enough that the things that I research will never, ever touch their own lives."

"They are skeptical of the rhetoric of addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes, and I get that. What they're really saying is that they may have partied in high school and college but look at them now. Look how strong-willed they are, how many good choices they've made...

"I had already stopped believing in the possibility of extravagant miracles. But small miracles, everyday miracles, like my mother rising from her bed, those still seemed worth hoping for."

"I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning."

"For years I hadn't been able to reconcile wanting to feel good with wanting to be good, two things that often seemed at odds during sex, especially sex the way I liked it."

"But the instruction is not simply to love you neighbor. It is to do so in the same way as you love yourself, and herein was the challenge. I didn't love myself, and even if I had, I couldn't love my neighbor."

"I can examine the brain of a depressed animal, but I am not given to thinking about what circumstances, if any, led up to that depression. Like everyone else, I get a part of the story, a single line to study and recite, to memorize."

"You are not alone, it says, and that is a comfort, not to the dying, but to those of us who are terrified of being left behind."

"what did we know about addiction? What, other than the 'just say no' campaigns, was there to guide any of us through he jungle of this?"

"There were other moments like this, where the woman whom I thought of in my head as fearsome shrank down to someone I could hardly recognize. And I don't think she did this because she wanted to. I think, rather, that she just never figured out how to translate who she really was into this new language."

"she and the baby's father were married and all was forgive, but I never forgot. We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn't change, but we do."

"Even though I felt ambushed, I did like the ambiguity that the revelation introduced into that verse. In the beginning there was an idea, a premise; there was a question."

"'What's the point of all of this?' is a question that separates humans from other animals. Our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion. When the answer to this question is 'Because God deemed it so,' we might feel comforted. But what if the answer to this question is 'I don't know,' or worse still, 'Nothing'?"

"There, boredom was paired with the hope of its relief, and so it took on a more menacing tint."

"Her devotion, her faith, they moved me. I was protective of her right to find comfort in whatever ways she saw fit. Didn't she deserve at least that much? We have to get through this life somehow."

"I didn't want to be thought of as a woman in science, a black woman in science. I wanted to be thought of as a scientist, full stop"

"I am looking for new names for old feelings. My soul is still my soul, even if I rarely call it that."

"Whenever I listened to his friends speak about issues like prison reform, climate change, the opioid epidemic, in the simultaneously intelligent but utterly vacuous way of people who think it's important simply to weigh in, to have an opinion, I would bristle. I would think, What is the point of all this talk? What problems do we solve by identifying problems, circling them?"

"We don't even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That's science, but that's also everything else, isn't it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions."

"Guilt and doubt and fear had already settled into my young body like ghosts haunting a house."

"But walking around with my father, she'd seen how America changed around big black men. She saw him try to shrink his size, his long, proud back hunched as he walked with my mother through the Walmart, where he was accused of stealing three times in four months."

"those of us who made up the species Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say. That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion"

"'Get ahold of yourself,' I said to the woman in the mirror, but doing so felt cliche, like I was reenacting a scene from a movie, and so I started to feel like I didn't have a self to get ahold of, or rather that I had a million selves, too many to gather."

"I had hardly recognized her, this woman who had always found skinny people offensive, as though a kind of laziness or failure of character kept them from appreciating the pure joy that is a good meal."