I think you’re amazing,’ someone says to someone else, but it doesn’t matter who, because they’re all amazing really. People are amazing.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

She made you decent, and in return you made her so happy

I think you’re amazing,’ someone says to someone else, but it doesn’t matter who, because they’re all amazing really. People are amazing.

You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.

Being a decent human being will require effort and energy.

And they did have fun, though it was of different kind now. All that yearning and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been moments in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant.