All systems have failed me. In five minutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and heaven begins.

When you are young, you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead.

I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain to be alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.

With Google I'm starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.

Keep your treasure to yourself.

If I've learned anything in twenty-nine years, it's that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift - bad choice of words - is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

Knee-Jerk Irony: The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.