A man may daydream of how he would spend a million dollars, but playing the same game with a billion dollars sours the fantasy. There are too many possibilities. The house he once wished for with all his heart is suddenly too small. The travel, too cheap. He wanted to visit an island. Now he contemplates buying one.

Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier.

Life's full of opportunities to make crappy decisions that feel good. And after the first one, the rest get a whole lot easier.

You're like this leopard who's pretending to be a house cat.

Downstairs, Grandad's warning Barron about something. His voice swells, and I catch the words, "In my day we were feared. Now we're just afraid.

It’s hard to come up with a scheme to thwart some other scheme you don’t even know about.

The first boy I fell in love with didn't know I loved him, but he managed to break my heart anyway.