So how’s it going?” “Okay. Glad to be home, I guess. Gus told me you were in the ICU?” “Yeah,” I said. “Sucks,” he said. “I’m a lot better now,” I said. “I’m going to Amsterdam tomorrow with Gus.” “I know. I’m pretty well up-to-date on your life, because Gus never. Talks. About. Anything. Else.

The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.

I just want the pleasure of noticing these things at a safe distance.

Do you know why I left America, Lidewij? So that I would never again have to encounter Americans." "But you are an American." "Incurably so, it seems.

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.

To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.

People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.