This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside.

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.

I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.