Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.

Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and dying out and floating dryly away.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.