I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.

He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.

Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.

At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.