Pain demands to be felt.

It feels great to feel what all the other champions have felt, ... Feeling the pain I felt so many years in Sacramento not being able to get over the hump.

The marks humans leave are too often scars.

I decided, then, that funerals are for the living

I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater. But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried.

He walked over to Isaac and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Dude, pillows don’t break. Try something that breaks.”
Isaac reached for a basketball trophy from the shelf above the bed and then held it over his head as if waiting for permission.
“Yes,” Augustus said. “Yes!” The trophy smashed against the floor, the plastic basketball player’s arm splintering off, still grasping its ball. Isaac stomped on the trophy.
“Yes!” Augustus said. “Get it!” And then back to me, “I’ve been looking for a way to tell my father that I actually sort of hate basketball, and I think we’ve found it.