The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank's name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. FOUR. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around.

Half-drunk on well-creamed gas station coffee and the exhilarating loneliness of a freeway in nighttime.

Nothing is as boring as other people's dreams.

He loved the scratching of pencil against paper when he was focused: it meant something was happening.

You just gotta tell her, man,’ I said. ‘You just gotta say, “Angela, I really like you, but there’s something you need to know: when we go to my house and hook up, we’ll be watched by the twenty-four hundred eyes of twelve hundred black Santas.

All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.

That was part of her, and you used to know it. It's like now you only care about the Alaska you made up.