but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive. - John Irving

This is a writer’s lesson:
To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgusted by his work; the terrorist pretends he is uninterested in the means. The ends, they say, are what they care about. But they are both lying. Ernst loved his pornography; Ernst worshiped the means. It is never the ends that matter — it is only the means that matter. The terrorist and the pornographer are in it for the means. The means is everything to them. The blast of the bomb, the elephant position, the Schlagobers and blood — they love it all. Their intellectual detachment is a fraud; their indifference is feigned. They both tell lies about having ‘higher purposes.’ A terrorist is a pornographer.

a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around who's enough like yourself to understand you.