It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.

Although I am good at enumerating my father’s flaws, it’s hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he’s dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than it is for mothers.

The web is my unconscious but it's also a wish -- a fantasy of what my own creativity might look like if I weren't constantly impeding its flow.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

I get to do for a living what I did as a child for fun, and that's pretty cool.