We matter

I'm on a John Green kick -- reading Paper Towns now, and just finished An Abundance of Katherines. As a memoirist, this passage, from the end of the book, absolutely slayed me. It's just brimming with the kind of hope a writer needs to keep writing:

"Maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other; maybe they are also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long ... Telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me -- an infinitesimal change -- and that infinitesimal change ripples outward, ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten but the stories will last. And so we all matter, maybe less than a lot but always more than none."

--An Abundance of Katherines, John Green