You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.

Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.

Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I'd just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blindly handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.

If you want to get close to somebody, you have to tell him or her something intimate about yourself. They'll tell you something intimate in return, and if you keep this going, maybe you'll end up in love.

And in your new lives you'll have to live entirely for that one sensation-that of imminent truth. And you're going to have to holler for it, steal for it, beg for it-and you're never to stop asking questions about it twenty-four hours a day, the rest of your life.

TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.

Sometimes I think God is like weather - you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it. Sadness and grief are part of being human and always will be.