I hate the idea that, when it comes to books and learning, hard is often seen as the opposite of fun. It's strange to me that we should be so quick to give up on a book or a math problem when we are so willing to grapple, for centuries if necessary, with a single level of Angry Birds.

Before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard.

If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.

I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.

He missed her like crazycakes.

Life works best when we think of people as people.

..there she is, and I am watching her through plexiglass, and she looks like Margo Roth Spiegelman, this girl I have known since I was two–this girl who was an idea that I loved. And it is only now, when she closes her notebook and places it inside a backpack next to her and then stands up and walks toward us, that I realize that the idea is not only wrong by dangerous. What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.