The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?

I was never the sort of child who believed in "monsters under the bed" or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father...once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called "antiparanoia," in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it.

Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses - places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.