You don't understand me. I'm a teenager. I've got problems!

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.

no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.