…because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff… Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.

I could stand up and go to her and kiss her. I could. But there is still too much to be ruined.

At the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.

One of the others shouted a translation: "The beautiful couple is beautiful.

I always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring. I doubted I could explain it to someone like Margo but drawing circles through life struck me as a kind of reasonable insanity.

I'm starting to realize that people lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, & so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.