"Questions I ask: Why does JJ Abrams find it acceptable to give Alice Eve a momentary half-nude scene in the new Star Trek (in a scene that in no way supports the plot) but Captain Kirk is able to walk around the Enterprise with a paunch belly?"
"And I did not understand so much. I did not understand, for instance, that people really die. I did not understand that death is irrevocable. I did not understand the grief of those who remember the dead. I did not understand that the horrors of history, those textbook cases of genocide, rape, and slaughter, would happen in my lifetime to people I knew. And so I did not understand that the earth is real, and that what happens on it happens to real people just like me. I did not understand that as I grew older my life would continue with me. I thought instead that each event in my life was discrete, each person of that moment only. I did not understand that the people I knew I would always know, one way or another, for the rest of my life. I did not know that one never stops knowing anything, that time continues to pass relentlessly, though without any particular vengeance, taking each of us with it. I did not understand then that there is no choice, that one always writes for the living, that there is no other way to create the future or to redeem the past. I also did not know that each human life is precious, brief, an agony, filled with pain and struggle, sorrow and loss."