He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.

She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

We have to admire the world for not ending on us.

We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.

It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.